The Fish Pond

Sand in Your Eye and Terror in Your Heart

We arrived Sunday too late to really do anything besides unpack, grocery shop, and run up to the top of the access walk to see just how close to the ocean we really were, so Monday morning was our first trip to the ocean. It was the first ever view of the ocean for Nemo, the first view of the Atlantic for Sunny. The day was bright and clear, the temps were comfortable with a good breeze coming off the ocean and low humidity. The first thing I noticed, though, was how rough the surf was, the roughest I'd seen to that point.

We meandered down the beach and found a good spot to put our stuff, not far from the access point, and not too close to the surf. Nemo was scared of it, and he'd cry and cry every time any member of our family would go near the water, much less in it. Unfortunately, the rest of the family is made up of daredevils who immediately jumped in. I tend toward the cautious, and I noticed that not many other people were playing in the water at all, even along the edges. I asked BigDaddyFish not to go in, not to take them in, but he says they're okay with him, he can handle it. I was worried, though, since I believe he tends to underestimate threat and he thinks I overestimate it, but I don't ever want my fears about things to keep my kids from living their lives - I don't want to be the parent like that guy on the tv commercial who puts flippers and a life jacket and a floaty ring and goggles and more on his daughter only to have them jump into two feet of water. BDF and I had already given the kids the "Safe Surf" lecture at least three times, so I backed off and let him take them in. BDF took one kid at a time in the water to jump around in the waves a bit, no more than thigh deep for him, so he could hold onto the kids and keep them safe. My job was to be the boundary enforcer, not allowing any of the other kids near the water. This wasn't hard because at that point the other kids were pretty cautious and didn't want to get wet yet.

While Nemo discovered that you could throw! sand! and it would fly! into your eye! or your mother's eye! I noticed the beach patrol guy coming down the beach on his little four wheeler thingy, stopping every so often and saying something to people on the beach. The wind was blowing, sand was flying, he was hopping along, and I'm trying to keep track of all the small people in all this mess and not get blinded by the sand Nemo was trying to cover me with. Trout was in the water with BDF doing their surf jumping thing, and the beach patrol guy worked his way to stop in front of us.

"We aren't allowing swimming today," he says. "We're telling people that even if you are staying in the shallows, like you are, it isn't safe to be swimming," I hear him say, as I keep an eye on all the kids to make sure no one goes into the water. I turn my head toward BDF to tell him, but he's already walked up to where we are so that he can hear, about 10 feet away from the beach patrol guy and me. Then I see Trout, and she runs sideways and jumps into a wave, her back to the surf in direct violation of what we've taught her, not seeing the larger one behind her, and then her feet are up in the air, her arms are flailing and she's going, on her back, she can't get her footing and she's being pulled out.

"GET HER, B!" I scream, knowing she can't get herself righted and she can't swim. She. Can't. Swim. It's too rough and she's being pulled out and there's no way I can get to her and BDF grabs her shoulder just as she starts to go by. She's coughing and sputtering and spitting sand and can't get out of the surf fast enough, but she's nodding and saying "I'm okay, I'm okay," between coughs. I realized I was holding my breath and let it out as the tears and nausea come, realizing just how close we were to losing her, even with the beach patrol guy standing right there.

He continued a bit of a lecture to me and BDF, mostly BDF, about not swimming because exactly what just happened could happen, with tragic results. He even said "I hate to say it, but, Death." He got back on his little ATV thing and drove off down the beach. I looked at BDF, put my hand up to lecture him, opened my mouth, and couldn't speak. He told me to put my hand down, I didn't need it, he knew.

I walked to our towels and sat down by Trout, biting my lip and drawing blood so I didn't start screaming. After all, she was safe. Sandy, shaken, but safe. Instead I sat and shook, waves of nausea and adrenaline cascading through me, unable to do anything about it but wait until it passed. The hell of it all is that Trout didn't really seem too bothered by it. Independently of each other BDF and I both sat her down and tried to explain just how close she had come to being swept out to sea, of us losing her, and she kept saying "I know, I KNOW. I'm Fine." She may have been, but I wasn't.

We let them play, primarily in the sand, for an hour more before heading back to the cottage. It was only then that I saw the red flags showing the beach as closed to swimming. I guess what Trout needed was to sleep on it, because for the rest of the trip she didn't want to go further into the water than one foot from the edge of the wash. We went to the beach Friday morning before we left, and that was the roughest surf I've ever seen. I was worried sick about it. BDF wanted to take each kid in so they could feel the power of the surf enough to knock their legs out from under them, but with him holding them, so they would develop more respect for the ocean and what it can do.

Trout refused to go. Lesson learned.

Hanna Chased Us Away

We are back a day early from our "vacation" thanks to Tropical Storm Hanna. I think for SAHMs it's not so much a vacation as a business trip - same old work, different location. We had our share of adventures and lessons learned, and I will be posting about them soon, after I recover a bit - I'm exhausted. I wanted to thank Uncle Orca, Hokgardner, Jodi, and Angi for holding down the fort for me with such awesome posts while I was gone.

And the Silver Medal for High Fever Goes To...

Nemo, for his incredible achievement of 105.3 degrees. We are so very proud of him.

Thankfully he is spent and the fever broke this morning. It was over 105 all weekend. He sat up Saturday morning after the horrible second night of nursing nonstop all night long, pointed to his throat and said "Huwt. Huwt." A more pitiful thing I'm not sure I've seen. So we did the dreaded Saturday morning pediatrician run, which actually wasn't so bad at all. They apparently have a new nurse who we haven't encountered before who was so cute on the phone. "Do you know where our office is?" Uh, yeah. When do you want me to come in? "Well, as soon as you can get here, of course." Very cute.

Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with the dreaded Coxackie virus, nothing they can do for him, keep giving him advil and go around with him attached to your body for the next 48 hours because he is miserable and doesn't want to do anything but nurse. I can't begin to tell you how much fun that was. And can someone please tell me why my kids felt they had to wake me up to tell me that my boob was hanging out no less than three times during the one two-hour non-nap that we were able to take on Saturday afternoon? I was in my own room, for Pete's sake, no one there to see me except them when they came in. Which they had no reason to do at all.

So I've done little but nurse the baby and daydream about my vacation for the past six days. I certainly wasn't doing any sleeping. He was all hot and twitchy and having trouble sleeping and using me as a human pacifier, and we were a bit worried. Only a bit, though, because high fevers run in the family (note that he only received the silver - Trout still holds gold medal status with a blistering 105.6). I'm just exhausted at this point.

So! A little bloggy business! That vacation I mentioned? Because we are Parents of the Year, we are pulling our spawn out of school the second week of school for a boondoggle to the Outer Banks for a week of eating sand and running away from waves. My wonderful next door neighbors will be watching the house, feeding the fish, and watering the plants, but I could use a few blogsitters to keep the Pond lively in my absence. Please let me know if you are interested - I'll need posts by Friday so I can pre-load them. The house we rented doesn't have Internet access (I know!).

In the mean time, you'll have to bide your time for a day or so for me to recover before we get to such titillating topics (HA!) as the fact that Nemo is "still" breastfeeding, my adventure in bus riding following a wonderful lunch downtown, and how I feel about the new school year starting tomorrow.

The Rain Jinx

About 12 years ago now, my father took BigDaddyFish, Uncle Orca/Agincourtdb and me to the annual reenactment at Gettysburg on July 4th weekend. That year, for whatever reason, the reenactment was held on the actual soil that the battles were fought on, instead of the nearby farm that hosts the reenactments now. That year it had rained for a week before the reenactment, steady, soaking rain that saturated the ground.

Back then there were maybe a couple of thousand reenactors, and they didn't have the living history site and other things going on that they do now. We drove up separately from my father and somehow ended up parking away from where he did. They parked us in one set of fields, and the reenactment was held further down in another field. That year they were filming some of the reenactment, to be used in some movie, but I don't remember which one.

Anyway, they have the battle and we watch and it starts to rain. That doesn't stop the reenactment so it didn't stop us, until it started to thunder and lightning, at which point we all called it quits, filmcrew and reenactors and spectators alike. The reenactors went back to their camps to be miserable, and we spectators started for the fields to go home. The rain steadily fell, heavier and heavier, and it didn't take very long before we were absolutely soaked through to the skin. Never do I think I've been that wet without getting in a pool or bath, even one year when BDF and I went backpacking in the Smoky Mountains and it poured. We still had rain gear then.

We got back to the parking fields and discovered that most of the vehicles were sunken to the top of the tires in mud. The already saturated ground couldn't take the new onslaught of rain, and they had a couple of guys on big tractors taking turns pulling out the cars that couldn't get out. Which was most of them. People were really really stupid about things, loading up the car with five people and then not understanding why they couldn't get out, or getting going only to stop for some reason and strand themselves ten feet away from where they started. It was a disastrous mess.

But we had a Jeep. A 4WD cherokee, back when it was still just a little box on wheels. We also were smart, so BDF got in the Jeep and Agincourtdb and I stayed out. Agincourtdb scouted out a route through the mud and sunken vehicles to the one paved road going out of the place. I simply tried to stay out of the way. Just as BDF got ready to go, a man stepped behind the Jeep.

"You can't go. I won't let you." Excuse us?

"I'm next. The tractor's coming to pull me out because I have to be at blah blah blah whatever justification and I'm next. You can't go."

Agincourtdb has always been far better at dealing with the public than the rest of us, so we let him handle telling the guy that we don't need the tractor and we are going to leave. The guy became more and more indignant, insisting that we would just get going and get stuck in the way so that the tractor couldn't get to him and he wasn't going to let us go. Agincourtdb tried to explain to the guy the error in his thinking, but the guy wasn't having it. Finally Agincourtdb said "Sir, I suggest you move. We are leaving now."

The guy didn't. We tried to warn him, but he didn't move. So BDF did what he had to do, and You Can't Go was treated to a mudbath. He was covered with mud, where he had been only wet before. BDF got the Jeep out, skated over the mud along the route that Agincourtdb directed, to the road, where the guys directing traffic saw what was happening and stopped everyone to let BDF get on the road. He opened the doors and Agincourtdb and I got in, waved to my dad who was waiting for the tractor, and went home. It took a day for my hair to dry.

I tell you this amusing story because this year we took the whole family and went to the reenactment at Gettysburg on July 4th. This year, like a decade earlier, it rained, but no thunder and lightning, and nobody got sunken in mud. We did, however, get drenched. But unlike then we have kids, and unlike then they had a living history village and reenactors of all ages. There were sunbonnets and hoopskirts and muskets and uniforms everywhere. They were filming again for a new movie, and there was so much to do and see besides the reenactment of the battles themselves. So the rain was only a minor distraction. Our kids loved it and showed such a huge amount of enthusiam that I think we may try some reenacting in the future.

But maybe only when the forecast calls for sunny skies.

At one point the commentator said something to the effect of "Now is where I get goosebumps - Americans fighting Americans on American soil on the Fourth of July." Indeed.

Afterwards we drove around through the actual battlefield park. Some of us went up the huge observation tower overlooking the Peach Orchards and the Eisenhower National Historic Site. I almost chickened out two flights of stairs from the top, but then I decided I'd be pissed at myself if I came that far and didn't go all the way to the top, so I pushed on. I'm glad I did and I'm proud of myself that I didn't let my fear get the best of me. Unfortunately my knee started acting up on the way down, and I ended up favoring the left knee with my right thigh. Today was the first day I woke up without pain in that thigh.

We were too late getting home to see any local fireworks, but we did get to see bits and pieces of about six different displays along our route home. Sunny was upset that we missed the fireworks but as BDF pointed out, we kinda did have fireworks that day, and we were able to see the encore performance of A Capitol Fourth on PBS, so she got to see fireworks after all.

Much better than 12 years ago, despite the rain jinx.

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Check over here to see a bit more about what my kids thought and did the last two weekends.

Or, if that's not your style, see what I thought of "What Not To Wear Mom Makeovers" over here.

New York Memories, Old and New

When BigDaddyFish was 5, someone he knew entered his photograph in a contest being held for some famous photographer, who wanted to make a coffee table book about people in America, and he won. BDF has an extremely expressive face, and I've no doubt that is what was so appealling about him. As part of his prize for winning, he and his family were flown to New York. They stayed at the Plaza. They went to the World Trade Center. They went to Central Park. They went all over the place. This had a tremendous effect on BDF. He remembers this trip so clearly to this day, in his late thirties. Fondly. He wanted to provide these kinds of memories for our children.

Since we know no photographers having contests like this, he makes the memories. When Trout was 6, he took her to New York. They flew up on a Friday, went to the Natural History Museum, Central Park, Times Square. They saw The Lion King on Broadway. They saw the Statue of Liberty. They spent the night at a high end hotel in Times Square. They ate pizza and ice cream and went shopping, and flew home Saturday.

BDF told me that the whole time they were there he kept thinking "I wish FishyGirl were here." So two weeks later he took me, since I'd never been.

This past weekend, it was Little Man's turn. Airfare has become quite expensive and Little Man isn't quite as enamored of flying as his sister, so they took the train up on Friday morning and did much of the same stuff. Natural History. Central Park, where they even took a boat out on a gorgeous afternoon. Top of the Rock. And they saw The Lion King.

BDF said Little Man didn't stop grinning the entire time. Little Man has started to suffer a bit of middlechilditis, and we've been having some trouble with him acting out, bad enough that next week we'll be meeting with the school about what we can do to help him. Here's hoping that this trip, this time alone with his dad, with have lasting effects far beyond the memories that they built.

Reflections from The Road

Taking 4 kids under the age of 8 on a road trip from Maryland to Illinois for 3 days (1 day driving, 1 day doing stuff there, 1 day driving back) doing almost all the driving during the day without a DVD player is enough to make any parent want to drop them all off on the side of the road in interminable Ohio (sorry, Angi, but it takes forever to drive across OH, especially when they are apparently doing construction in every single major city and a couple of minor ones that Route 70 passes through) and drive as fast as you can in the opposite direction. But since I made a promise to my grandfather to make sure his wishes regarding disposal of his remains were carried out, and BigDaddyFish was short on leave, a speed run it was.

We actually left Thursday night and stayed at the Casselman Inn in Grantsville, MD overnight, and did the bulk of the driving on Friday. The Casselman is an interesting place. It is owned by a Mennonite family and is still family run, but the next generation has taken over a lot of the operations. It used to be that all the people that worked there were Mennonite, but that is apparently not the case anymore. BDF stayed there several times on trips with his church youth group as a teenager, and he had fond memories of those times and wanted to stay there again. We had two adjoining rooms, and the cost for both of those rooms was less than one room virtually anywhere else I've ever travelled. I was looking forward to a nice sleep with the kids in the other room and no one kicking me. It was not to be.

The kids had fallen asleep in the car and woke up when we got there, just shy of midnight, and proceeded to stay up until 1:30. BDF and I were exhausted and kept trying to get the kids to go to sleep. Sunny decided she was scared in the other room, even though she was closer to us physically than she ever is at home, and refused to sleep there. It ended up that she and BDF slept in one bed, Nemo and I in the other, and Trout and Little Man got their own beds. THEY were in hog heaven. I actually slept surprisingly well, considering.

The decor at the Casselman is an odd sort of combination of turn-of-the-century antique and hand-crafted mennonite, with 60s/70s shag carpet thrown in for kicks and giggles. The walls were paper thin and covered in busy, noisy patterened wallpaper that I can see inducing seizures in those prone to them. There were noisy room air conditioners that cooled very effectively and I thought provided a fair amount of white noise to help us sleep, but BDF insisted he was cold, and while I am forever arguing that he can add blankets and covers while I can only get so undressed, he won and we kept the air conditioner turned off. When we woke up in the morning he muttered that he was too hot. I wonder why.

Breakfast was inexpensive and plentiful. I got eggs, bacon, hashbrowns, and toast (I think it was all of $4), but I only ate the eggs, picked at the bacon, nibbled the hashbrowns, didn't touch the toast (it had margarine on it, which I don't eat). The eggs were great, the bacon was overly fatty but perfectly cooked, so I just picked the fat off, but the hashbrowns were the worst I've ever had, but I can't figure out why. They just weren't good. BDF had buckwheat pancakes, and after a taste of those I wished I had ordered that instead of trying to stick to my efforts of eating more protein and less carbs. If you go there, get those buckwheat pancakes. Awesome.

People watching is fun, even when it's just you and one other person. When I went to check in it was late, and the woman who came out to check us in was in her late fifties, I'd guess, and apparently not Mennonite as she was dressed in regular old American Consumer attire. She mentioned that they were just getting computers, and she was asking me if they were "hard to use." I didn't quite know how to answer that, but told her that it's like anything else new, it takes a while to learn and you need to practice, but once you get it the computer will make other tasks easier. She mused about what they would be doing with the computer, probably "typing in names and addresses, probably a lot of typing." I agreed that at first it would probably be typing and clicking.

"Clicking?" she inquired. "What do you mean, 'clicking'?" I peeked over the desk to see the computer there.

"The mouse. There. If you move it, you will see a little arrow on your screen, and once you move it to something you want, you can push the little button, or 'click' the button."

"Oh! You seem to know a lot about computers." Not to hear my husband tell it, but enough. She was cute.

She tried in vain to process my credit card, because apparently she had to enter the room number in the credit card machine, and she couldn't figure out how to put in two room numbers at once. I suggested that it was okay with me to divide the total in half and just process it twice, with each room number, but for some reason she didn't want to do that. She just asked me to come back in the morning and pay then. Then I had to pay $2 in cash as a key deposit for the room. Good, old fashioned keys.

A younger woman, probably the daughter of the nighttime woman as she was younger than me, processed my credit card the next day, and gave me back my $2 when I turned in the keys.

While waiting for our food to come, I people watched in the dining room. A woman came in with her husband and two sons, I'd say about 12 and 10 years old. She was dressed in an off-the-rack, bright red dress, and she had a traditional Mennonite head covering on her hair, which was put up. She had the most impressive posture I've ever seen on anyone, including a friend who had had surgery to fuse some of her vertebrae; ramrod straight, so straight you could have used her as a level. The husband and sons were dressed in American Consumer clothes, looking much like the boys' section at Kohl's where I shopped today for Little Man, who apparently had a growth spurt on this trip. Anyway, at one point she got up and went to talk to the woman working in the kitchen, who was dressed in traditional Mennonite attire, complete with pinned apron and head covering, and I overheard them talking about teaching Sunday school at their church.

Here's where I reveal what an idiot I am. She apparently was in a mixed marriage, where she is Mennonite and her husband/children are not. Somehow my small brain never made allowances for such a thing to occur. Mixed race? Of course. Catholic/Jewish marriage? Easy peasy. Athiest/Southern Baptist? Not likely, but I can picture it. Gay marriage? Why the hell not? Mennonite/Non? No way. I guess it's just that I see Mennonite not just as a religion but a way of life, which of course if you are a believer in any religion it should be a way of life, but...I guess I just never saw the Mennonite way of life as ever being able to coexist with the typical wasteful, consumer-driven American culture as it exists now. I am glad that this woman and her family were there to help open my mind. I saw them as we were leaving, and they drove off in a red Toyota Prius. It was neat.

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Just over the line into Ohio from Wheeling, WV, the usual reflectors that are at the end of the guardrail were replaced in one section with a simple orange metal placard, with a blue cross inside it instead of reflectors. No name or other information on it, just a simple blue cross, maybe 3 square inches total. I imagine it was a more permanent memorial to someone who died at that spot, rather than the usual wooden cross or flowers, but it was cool to see.

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Sunny got a hamburger at one point instead of her usual chicken nuggets, but I think she's a bit unclear on the concept. She pulled the hamburger patty out of the bun, put the bun aside and said "Yum, chicken. I don't want the bread, Mommy, I just want the chicken part. It's good."

I didn't enlighten her.

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On the way out there and back we had a couple of instances where the ABS light came on and the little doodad lit up to show that the traction control was off. At the same time we leaked a bit of coolant at every stop we made, then the ABS light would go out and the traction control doodad turn off, too. We never overheated; in fact the temperature gauge never moved. It was worrisome at the time, but we never did figure out what the heck was making it do that, and the van performed fine the whole trip, even the brakes. It was a good thing, too, because for the last 3-4 hours of the ride home on Sunday it rained so bad sometimes we couldn't see right in front of us. And it was night. But we made it home okay, exhausted, but safe and sound.

We did have a WTF moment at the hotel in Illinois, which I'll be writing about over on Props and Pans, and the memorial itself was lovely - more about that later.

Wash of a Weekend

This past weekend we took the kids to my friend's cabin in Pennsylvania.  Our van is acting funny (I still maintain it is possessed by a demon), so we decided to take BigDaddyFish's commuting car, a Subaru Outback.

Three kids.  Side-by-side.  In the back seat.

Can I just say NEVER AGAIN?!?

Screaming was the order of the day - them screaming because someone touched them, or looked at them, or had an idea about them, or something, or just boisterous screaming while they were playing with each other and don't understand the meaning of "inside voices," or else BDF and me screaming at the kids to be quiet because we couldn't even talk to each other because the kids were so loud, or else the baby screaming because she was "so sad" for various reasons over the course of the weekend.  Just a veritable screamfest.  Of epic proportions.

When we arrived home last night, BigDaddyFish asked me if we did ANYTHING right this weekend.  We did - here are some highlights:

• Rainbow Trout and BDF went up for a helicopter ride in the dinkiest helicopter I've ever seen.  I managed to make it through without a panic attack, mostly because Sunny flipped out when the helicopter took off and started to bank around to the left.  Sunny saw that and said "Oh, they're coming back" and I explained that no, they weren't right now, they would be back in a few minutes.  She flipped and exclaimed "I want my Daddy to come back" so I was distracted from my own anxiety by trying to console her.  They made it safely - they just flew over the lake and park where we were staying.  Trout sat in the front and made her dad sit in the back.  When we asked her how it was, she said "It was so cool I couldn't even talk."  What greater reward for me for letting her go in spite of my own fears?
• Little Man fell in love with a waitress in a restaurant where we had dinner, so he wouldn't talk to her but kept whispering in BDF's ear when he wanted something.  It was too cute.  Plus, he got a lego set.  And I let him take pictures after we came down off the water tower.
• Yes, water tower.  Here in sue-city, no one would EVER let anyone climb up on a water tower due to liability reasons.  Up there, in the relative boondocks, they have a water tower and you can climb steps up to the top and look out over the lake and countryside.  Beautiful.
• We went to Horseshoe Curve, where trains go completely around you.  BDF and I had been years ago, before we had kids, but this was the first time we'd taken the kids.  They have a little meadow and the kids just ran around and played and picked wildflowers and watched trains.  It was quite relaxing.
• Due to my girth and general grumpiness and discomfort, I have a big problem sleeping, so I got a full bed to myself while BigDaddyFish and Sunny slept on the futon in a different room.  They slept well, Sunny was delighted to be sleeping with Daddy, and I slept as well as I could for six months pregnant.

It wasn't all bad, and those were just a few of the high points, but we chalk it up to a learning experience, thank our friends profusely for the use of their cabin in hopes that they might let us go back someday to right our wrongs, and are simply glad to be home, and grateful for our health, BDF's job, and all our other blessings.

Including the minivan I swore I would never get and couldn't live without.