As the weather is so lovely, I thought it would be a good time to share one of our favourite beach stories! One summer about 8 years about when our kids were aged between 4 and 11, Sean was working most of the day on a Saturday and so was a good friend of mine, so I offered to take her kids and mine to the beach for the day.

So, I took all six down to the beach and reserved ourselves a spot. I set up the windbreaks and umbrella, sun-creamed all the kids and then entertained them for around 6 hours. Sean then arrived with my friend. She bought a dinghy, which we immediately blew up and took out on the water. Sean said he’d look after the kids while we headed out in the dinghy for a row and to give me a bit of a break.

Now, we had a lovely time bobbing on the waves and getting away from the noise of the shore. To be honest, I was a bit hopeless at rowing, a bit of lack of co-ordination! But we got pretty far out. Eventually, we felt we should head back to shore and check everything was ok with the kids. As we drew closer, we saw all the children standing on the shoreline calling something to us. We couldn’t hear, but they were very urgent about it. As it felt urgent, I jumped out of the boat and swam to shore. The kids immediately surrounded me, and that’s when I heard this story!

When I had left Sean with the kids, the kids had all gone off to play, and Sean had been enjoying a bit of peace after a busy morning. After a few minutes, he decided to have a quick headcount and counted only five instead of six. Both my friend’s kids were with him, but only three of ours. The youngest, Leo, 4, was nowhere to be seen. Minor panic set in. Sean was sure he must be with one of the other kids.

He checked with them all, and none had seen Leo for a few minutes. Bournemouth beach in the summer is heaving! Sean took a deep breath and commissioned the kids to go off in pairs to try to find him. They scoured the shoreline without success, and they regrouped. At this point, Sean began to try to rationalise in his head what he would say to me when I got back. He knew I’d had the kids on my own for six hours and he’d had them for less than half an hour and lost one! One thought was that maybe three out of four was ok!

Finally, my friend’s daughter ran up and said she thought she had found him but couldn’t be sure. Sean was a little baffled by this but ran in the direction she pointed in. There was a large crowd of people surrounding a beach hut. Sean pushed his way through and there, right at the centre, with some police officers and some friendly beach hut owners, was Leo. Sean swooped in and scooped Leo up. He reassured the police he was definitely Leo’s dad and managed to convince a tearful Leo to agree!

He headed back to the beach camp and gathered the children to talk to them. “Now kids, Leo’s here, everything is ok, there’s no need to tell mum about this!” Cue the kids then running to the shore to wave and shout at us as we headed back!