She sells ,sea shells ,on the sea shore!!

I was just going through a website looking for sea shells for some school project reference. It amazed me to see such wonderful creatures...and all I did these years were collect them from beaches , wash them and kept them in strategic places...showed them off to the kids who gazed at them so lovingly...

They were the ones who actually saw them for what they were...I did see the colors but they saw the changing patterns, those beautiful streaks of light passing through...and then this year it came back
On our visit to Goa we stayed on this beach which was filled with shells....starfishes..which I had conveniently relegated to the encyclopedia. God!! they are such amazing beauties.

Now my 'show off' collection has tripled and so has my need to know more about them. Like my lil one repeats a definition from his school..'teacher helps us to gain knowledge' but no I gained from these glittering eyes, that of our lil children...

They could spend hours just looking for that little crab that would crawl out unsuspectingly out of the small nooks and shells, and the sand..Can we as adults devote an entire day just looking at shells and searching all over the bare sand for them?? I wonder??