I’m laughing about the item that I got asked about multiple times on our little Horseshoe Bay family get-away. It’s this Hanna Andersson “Out of the Sun Hat” that Charlie is wearing. All of my boys have one, and we’ve had these hats every year since my oldest was little. I’m laughing because last summer we went to visit my sister in Florida and got a “cute” family beach picture (picture below) that earned a few giggles and comments from my insta followers. The comment was something along the lines of “it looks like your family is allergic to the sun”. I can laugh at that…and know that it DOES look like that…and still not care. I’m basically translucent and I’ve passed that on to my kids, so one of my mama jobs is to keep them protected from the sun as best I can when they’re little…especially at the beach where it’s so easy to get caught up in the fun and less easy to wrangle kids into reapplying sunscreen. I had a skin cancer scare at 13, so I always feel like the more sun protection I can find, the better. This hat protects 99% of UVA/UVB rays, is swimsuit fabric – so it can get wet without feeling gross, and it covers their neck and ears when they’re building sandcastles and trying to bury my poor husband in the sand. Ha! I figured that this hat may not be the coolest, but it is effective so I packed it for our vacation but didn’t expect anyone to be too interested in it. I had SO many moms come up to me randomly to ask where we’d gotten our hats – mama win! They are easy and super effective so if you’re in the easy sun protection camp, go scoop one up. They tend to get picked over at the end of the season and the HA website looks like there are only solid colors right now (our stripes were from a year or two ago). For sizing references, this year my almost 7 year old is wearing the Large, my 4 year old is wearing the Medium, and my almost 2 year old is wearing the Small. They all have sorta big heads, but it’s at least some reference point!
