Going to the beach, sort-of

This week, I had John pick up a bag of sand for the kids. I wanted to turn their water table into a sand table. I always wanted a sand table vs. sand box thinking the kids wouldn't get as dirty standing to play with the sand vs. sitting in it. :-)
Thursday afternoon, we played outside to try out the sand table for the first time and it was a big hit. They LOVED it and played with it for a few hours! They are getting really good about playing in the backyard and I can even come in the house for a few moments to get dinner going or something like that (the windows are all open so I can see the kids). The dog door is also always open and they'll pop their heads in for a bit just to see if I'm there I guess then run back outside to play. Well they played with the sand for about 3 hours Thursday and by the time dinner was ready they were walking sand balls! I had to dust them off, strip them down and wipe them off just so we could eat dinner (then it was straight to the tub). They proceeded to throw sand in the air - just to watch it fall; fill buckets with sand and dump them in the grass just to see how many piles they could make. They even dumped sand on their table outside and tried to "finger paint" with the sand. Sand was everywhere! When it was all said and done, I think they dumped at least half the sand out of the box and they may have even had less sand on them and everywhere else, if we had a sand box vs. table!!!
Oh well. The sand is cheap so we'll fill it up occasionally. Hopefully they'll start playing with it in the table vs. just watching it fall to the grand. They really had a blast with that stuff. I just have to remember to only let them play with the sand on bath nights!