I like my nieces, but quite frankly they are not ambitious enough, certainly not when it comes to building things on beaches. They are happy enough with a hole, maybe at a pinch and architectually unremarkable castle, but I like to aim for something more.
I mean why can't you have a dragon, I mean kids like dragons, they had been telling me about them all morning, they had not really understand my St George jokes, but they seemed to at least have a basic understanding of dragons, what they did, the ability to breathe fire, even if they didn't seem to understand their key weakness was a dude with a sword.
So when we tripped down to the beach I thought the suggestion of building a dragon would go down well, but it was meet with indifference, that wasn't going to stop me though, I had a vision and I was going to fulfil it.
Step 1 was to make a basic shape of a dragon, tail, wings, body, head.
Step two was to get across the texture of said dragon, scales could be done with shells I guess, but we haven't got all day - seaweed would probably work (little did I know that one of my nieces believes that seaweed is yuk and will not touch it so I wouldn't be getting any help)
The seaweed works, there were two types for the body - I surmised that a little like a bird it would have two tones of skins, one for the neck and one for the body.
Then of course there is the head - this is were it comes alive - some shells and feathers make the eye and then the find of the day, so red seaweed and the dragon to breathing fire as all good dragons should.
So there I was pretty darn happy with the dragon (although realising I should have done it on the upward slope for photography reasons but there you go) I proudly presented it to the girls, assuming that maybe the concept of a dragon was a not interesting but once it was there they would be more pleased (This works with Lego creations) - but I was meet with an unenthusiastic 'cool' and then a request to join them as they went to look for echidnas in the sand dunes (which we didn't find, but I did see a Kangaroo).
But as we were returning a family was passing us and the son was saying to his dad "Did you see that dragon back there, that was really cool." So at least someone appreciated it.