Obliviously On She Sails

The first day of fall came and went without mention in our house. We didn't try to balance an egg on its end on a table or celebrate the equinox by dancing naked in a field with other hippies or anything. It was just, for us, another day among all the other days of the year, another day of work and school and leftovers and television shows, albeit one with a higher allergen and irritant count than might be considered completely comfortable.

One of the unintended consequences of taking our vacation over Labor Day, during the very last unofficial week of the summer, is that once it was over, there really wasn't much left to look forward to. We missed all the picnics and parties, all the pools are closed for the season, and since Shae still has another year of pre-school, we didn't really have any back-to-school or ready-for-kindergarten shopping to do. It occurs to me that September might possibly be the saddest, slowest month of the year.

Early fall can be so off-putting, especially this year, when we haven't had an Indian summer, and all signs point to none coming. It started raining here at the beginning of August and it almost hasn't stopped for six weeks, the temperatures gradually but consistently dropping, ever-so-slowly so that you didn't realize it, until one morning you start needing a jacket in the morning and you never really stop. Everything is changing to shades of yellows and browns that will fade to grays and whites before we know it.

That's partly why I waited as long as I could stand it before I posted this one last picture from vacation, one of my very favorites, a veritable oasis of life and air and light and color among the leaves that are already falling and the grass that is already growing dormant and the claustrophobia that is already starting to close in on me, as the seasons change and the weather changes and everything changes, like it or not, and so it goes.

And obliviously on she sails.

Divalicious

These pictures need basically no commentary, so I'm just going to go ahead and throw them up for you to enjoy (although because this is my blog and I never shut up, I will have a few little things to say at the end).

That scarf is by Michael Kors. MICHAEL M-F'ING JUDGE ON M-F'ING PROJECT RUNWAY M-F'ING KORS. And that kid is ROCKIN' it like the superest supermodel ever. Naomi Campbell, watch your back, because Gladys Leibowitz rides again, people.

I Don't Know How They Do It (Or What "It" Is, Exactly)

These were supposed to go up yesterday - sorry. We had technical difficulties at home (i.e., the power inexplicably went out and I couldn't get the pictures uploaded sooner). Now if you could only tell me what is happening in some of these pictures, I would owe you a great debt.

File under: My kid is weird and plays with random things she finds on the beach.

HELLO TO YOU TOO!

Kids in buckets are hysterically funny, full stop.

So this horse walks into a bar, and the bartender says, "Why the long face?"

It is apparently never too soon for wee ones to learn the "bish, PLEASE" face.

He is up to something, but I can't remember what.

Whoa, dude, SERIOUSLY?

Fetching, just fetching.

Got milk? (I have never seen an actual milk moustache in the wild before.)

Joey didn't really like the ocean much (it was really rough anyway), but he LOVED playing in the sand.

Now SHE, on the other hand ...

One day on the trip -- I think it was Tuesday but it could have been Wednesday, I don't remember -- we had a lot of rain and the kids needed to be entertained, so we got out the bikes and they literally, yes LITERALLY, rode in circles around the garage for HOURS. It was probably one of the better nights we had, honestly, because they just did loops and figure 8's until the pretty much keeled over.

Makayla even got in on the action -- my parents took turns pushing her around in the stroller, following the other kids, like the smallest, strangest, most adorable parade you've ever seen in your life.

Haldaman Family Portraits, 2011

When we go on vacation, we always try to get a picture of the whole family, having fun together (or at least pretending to). We managed to get a shoot in on Sunday night, before some of the boys had to go home for work.

You can see that we tried to match everybody within the "family groups" -- my youngest sister and her gang in white, my middle sister and her peeps in blue, my posse in green, and my parents in pink. Except my mom didn't have a pink shirt, so she's the outlier. Which is pretty much typical for her, anyway. (In a good way, always.)

We also did a semi-formal shoot on Thursday night with just my parents and the kids, everyone in white. It was a just a touch overcast and very humid that night, so the combination of the elements plus the lighting plus my general ineptitude made for slightly gauzy photos, but I like them. If I actually knew what I was doing, these pictures would have been amazing. (Also: not sure if you can tell, but my nephew is wearing a tiny little guayabera shirt with monkeys embroidered on it. ZOMG MONKEYS! Little boys' clothes are SO CUTE. Why oh why don't they make anything that cute in my size? Although I'd never rock it quite as hard as he does, the handsome little devil.)

I also got this picture of my parents on one of the balconies of the house, which is one of the best pictures that has been taken of my parents in the last 30-some-odd years. Are they not among the cutest parents ever? I hope my husband and I are that adorable after we've been married for almost 40 years.

Some other sub-family pictures that came out great. (I don't know where the nice photo of my little family is, but whatever, it isn't as lovely as these are, anyway.)

Totally gratuitous, but COME ON. Work it out, Miss Divalette! I miss when Shae was smaller and less attitudinal and she would sit still and pose for pictures for me. Experience leads me to suspect that Makayla won't do this for much longer, so we all took as many pictures of her as we could. Plus: hello, she's gorgeous. (I think this looks like a catalog picture. Baby sold separately.)

Caption for this one: Girls' Club, Class of 2011.

And all of the "biological" Haldamans, on the last day of vacation, which was also the nicest, weather-wise. Because of course it was.

Tomorrow: OUTTAKES! The silly photos are always the best. (A quick sample, via Instagram.)

I'm On A Boat

While we were on vacation we took advantage of a Groupon -- no, my capacity for cheapitude does not extend to vacations (in fact, I think there is NO BETTER TIME to be thrifty than when you are on vacation, if only to awe the world with your mad shipping ninja skills) -- and we all went for a whale watch. (OK, "marine mammal watch," technically.)

Yes: all of us. All eleven of us -- thirteen, if you count the camera and the contraband stroller as one person each, as I do -- drove an hour and a half south on the Garden State Parkway, each way, to take a three-hour boat tour. On an overcast, windy day, with a hurricane just over a week past, another tropical storm looming just off the coast, and three more weather situations brewing.

And it was AMAZING.

The kids loved being on the top deck of the ship, just hanging their heads and arms over the side of the railings, feeling the wind in their faces. We honestly could have driven around in a big circle for three hours and they wouldn't have cared.

But. BUT!

Dolphins. Tons of f'ing dolphins.

Now for all I know, these are the same four or five dolphins in every single picture, and I don't even care. (The captain said there were about 35 in total; I don't know.) They were RIGHT THERE. I could have leapt off the side of the boat and ridden on the back of one off into the sunset. (I didn't, but only because I was afraid would misjudge the jump and fatally rack myself on one of the lower decks, and of all the undignified ways that there are for me to get myself killed, "impaled on the oar of an emergency dinghy" is not really near the top of the list.)

(Also, if I got the camera wet on my way to a watery grave, my husband would never have forgiven me.)

Trying to maintain one's composure and act like a civilized human being when there are ZOMG REAL LIVE MOTHERTRUCKING DOLPHINS RIGHT OVER THERE SQUEE! is exhausting, yo. Plus I think I might possibly have gotten whiplash or something, because the water was REALLY rough -- we didn't see any whales because we couldn't get out as far as the boat normally goes because of all the storms and whatnot -- but at the time I didn't even notice because I was so busy checking "see live dolphins up close in the wild" off my bucket list.

See? Good times.

Children and Other Wildlife

So. We survived vacation. It rained and there were a lot of late nights and early mornings and entirely more bug bites that I ever thought were possible -- obviously, it's been a while since I went camping -- but we survived. Not just survived, but thrived, really, except for that one time when I got that killer pain in my neck-and-back, and a couple of stubbed toes, and a pedicure that didn't even last a week, and some rough surf, and someone drank all my Malibu (and it wasn't me), and possibly someone else consumed quite a lot more Oreos than might perhaps be considered seemly (and maybe it was me that time). Still. Isn't that why they call it a "vacation"?

We hung out by the (heated) (private) (in-ground) (wonderful) pool.

And we frolicked on the (gorgeous) (mostly private) (mostly deserted) (almost eerily quiet) beach.

And we dug around with heavy construction equipment on the dunes, which is generally considered off-limits, but not here.

AND THERE WERE DOLPHINS, which I will show you tomorrow. (For more pictures in the meantime, although sadly none of marine mammals, you can check out my Tumblr-slash-Instagram-photo-dump.)

All in all, I can't complain.

Sand Traps

Round-up of beach pictures.

I love - LOVE! - this picture, but am very disappointed that I cut off the top of Shae's head. Apparently I really committed to playing the part of my mother - a lot of the pictures from my youth are of partially headless people, and I seem to recall my mother often being on camera duty.

This was taken no more than 10 minutes into the day. Makayla got the idea of a day at the beach pretty quickly - loll around in the sand and shove stuff into your mouth. Usually it's frozen grapes or cheese curls, but I suppose sand toys work fine too. Lather, rinse, repeat, then take a nap.

Apparently two of the finer points of modern sand castle construction involve dumping water on ... I'm not sure what, exactly ... and getting yourself covered with a fine coating of sand that is invisible until your mother offloads the pictures. I'm not sure why. I am usually the beach-towel wrangler and don't get involved in land wars in Asia or manual labor.

Makayla is all, "I MUNNA EACHOO!" And I can't really blame her for thinking that this is an appropriate way to have a conversation with other humanoids, honestly, because every time I hold her I tell her I want to eat her face. Also: totally adorable baby is totally adorable.

This picture is just here because it is cool. (The handsome young man on the right is my cousin Greg. Shae wore his ass out, much like he and his brother used to wear my sisters' and my asses out when we took family trips to the beach when he was her age. The circle of life, n'at.)

"Okay, if I can't EACHOO!, then can I maybe just LEEKYOO! a little bit? Pretty please? Would you deny this face anything it demands? Really? You would? Hmm. Fine, then. I will just have a hysterically comical diaper explosion in the car on the way home, then. That'll teach you, bwahaHAHAHA!" (Funny how they learn the evil laugh so early, innit?)

An actual jellyfish, and not a whole bunch of gross salps this time! Whoo hoo! When we were kids, finding jellyfish corpses that washed up on the beach were like finding the Holy Grail, because you could torture your siblings with them, or cut them up into pieces to use as "crystal" decorations on your sand castles. (I usually went with Option A. And that's my sister's foot, not mine.)

This is my very favorite picture from the whole day - I love how in this picture you can see exactly how much my sister and her daughter look alike. The shape of their foreheads, eyes, noses, mouths, chin - all identical. And their eyes are EXACTLY the same color. And they are both SO HAPPY to be at the beach, just like Shae and I always are.

Good times, good times.