little beach bunny

Sage left town with us on her first beach outing this weekend, and made us even more proud of her than usual. She was completely fearless on the ocean, obediently clinging to the side of the raft in her nanny's grasp as instructed, but constantly trying to convince said nanny that she should be allowed to float off on her own to join her parents in the deep water.

"I want to go to Mommy," she tried. "I'm a big girl now!" Also: "I want to go to Daddy; Daddy will take care of me."

"But how will you get to them, Sage?" her nanny challenged her.

"I'll swim," Sage said, flailing her legs determinedly behind her. "See? I'm learning!"

The next day, we took her wading in shallower water; and after some initial squeamishness, she was able to nerve herself to reach down and pluck a starfish out of the clear surf on her own. "What are these wiggling things it has, Daddy?" she wanted to know.

"Those are its feelers," her father explained. "It's trying to find the sand that it used to lie on."

"Then it wants to go home," Sage decided, "to its mommy and daddy." So she gently lowered it back into the water and let it go, calling "Bye, starfish!" as it sank downwards.

She also showed off her increased ability to share by allowing her new friend Giselle to borrow her sandcastle-making toys. Giselle is the daughter of the cook at the beach; and somehow the two of them became fast friends, despite the prodigious language barrier that separated them.

"Punta tayo sa taas," Giselle would say, referring to the second floor of the beach house.

"What?" Sage would reply. Moments later, she would be struck by the same notion: "Hey, let's go upstairs."

"Ano?" Giselle would ask.

But our little girl is nothing if not adaptive. By the time they finally agreed to go upstairs to the second floor balcony, they got to see a flock of birds taking flight from the shoreline.

"Ay! Ay!" our little English-speaker cried out, in a perfect Tagalog accent. "Birds!"