Go to the beach on Saturday morning; revisit the essence on Monday night -- that's how it works in my house.

With the sun shining, the Indian Ocean as flat as a lake on a windless day, and a few hours with nothing to do but wallow in the shallows with my three-year old and my one-year old, Saturdays in Seychelles can be wonderful.

My children are real beach kids, completely comfortable in floaties and sunscreen, fascinated by hermit crabs and sea cucumbers, and happy as clams when they're wet. Sam is almost a swimmer now, and although he maintains a healthy respect for the sea, is quite relaxed about waves and fish and the like. Cj is too little to understand much of anything aside from the nice feel of coolish water and, unfortunately, the yumminess of sand.

I don't know what it is about sand, but kids seem to love eating it. Okay, maybe just my kids -- it's not something I've researched, but seems a safe assumption. Sam did when younger, and now it's Cj's turn to grab handfuls whenever possible and shove masses of the stuff into her mouth and gum away quite happily with a give-away sand moustache and beard to let me know exactly what it is she's been into.

Thankfully, the water in Seychelles is still pure and unpolluted and our neighborhood beach is especially clean as we're just about the only ones using it, so we've not had any dire consequences from sand ingestion ... no illnesses have presented, no intestinal parasites from beach critters that would see the human digestive tract as an acceptable new home.

Nope. The only side effect of Cj's predilection for sand wiches is actually more of an end effect, if you can possibly excuse the expression (and I won't blame you a bit if you can't), and shows up in her diaper forty-eight to sixty hours later.

Like Fred Flintstone's daughter, mine is also a Pebbly Pooh.

It can't be pleasant passing a couple of handfuls of sand; sure doesn't look like fun, anyway. Cj goes through some interesting facial contortions when doing her business under all circumstances, but gives it a certain extra something when sand is in the works. And gritty poop is not nice, no matter what. There are times her nappy contents look like miniature versions of the termite mounds found on the plains of Africa, and I occasionally wonder if there could be gold in them thar pellets. Certainly, some trace elements have made their way through her ... trace elements like gravel and grit.

I don't worry much about this sand eating thing, though. I understand that it's a phase she's going through, and like most, this too shall pass.