Coast of Carolina

Oh yeah ... vacation. We've been home for more than a month, so it's probably time to put some pictures up, isn't it?

Truth be told, I haven't written about vacation yet because I'm practicing my usual Zennish strategy of better living through denial. It's like, if I pretend that vacation isn't over yet, then it isn't.

It was our usual family vacation: a chaotic mess of early rising, child limbs, Crocs, pancakes, ice cream, tantrums, Disney movies, mismatched outfits, and missing pacifiers -- and that was all on the first morning.

The weather wasn't the greatest, too hot the first few days and almost too cold after that, and the ocean was cold even by my standards (in the mid-60s, which -- look, I can tolerate A LOT, but I draw the line at hypothermia on vacation, you know?), but we barely even noticed, to be honest.

All the kids were just phenomenal. My sister's boys get more awesome every day, my niece is just the bee's knees, my kid was fairly well behaved most of the time ...

... there are even a couple of photos with ME in them, for a change, although let's be honest here and admit that I have GOT to learn how to pose so that I don't look like I'm made up of, like, 75% boobs and back fat.

I always hesitate to say that I can't wait to do it again, because that's such a gigantic understatement. I'm ready to go on vacation again pretty much the second we get in the car to come home. If I ruled the world and could do whatever I wanted, I'd arrange it so that we could all be together whenever we wanted, always.

Are we going back there, to the coast of Carolina?

As soon as possible.

PS - If you're interested in seeing ALL my vacation photos (all the good ones, anyway), you can view them here, including the Instagrams. If I can figure out how, I'll add my sisters' pictures, too.

Wish You Were Here

On Monday -- just three days from now -- Shae starts kindergarten. I KNOW. Didn't we just have her first birthday party like a week ago? They weren't messing around when they said time flies. Like, it was JUST Memorial Day, wasn't it? And now here we are, face to face, a couple of Silver Spoons ... WAIT. Wrong song.

ANYWAY. Shae and my sister and my niece and my parents and I played hooky on Wednesday and went to the beach, to soak up some sun and splash in the surf while we still can. (Also, we knew someone who was down there for the week, so we could stay overnight.) And you know what?

It was kind of a last-minute, game-time decision, but it was exactly the right one. It's funny how sometimes you don't realize how much you just need a mental-health, stress-relief, photosynthesizin' kind of day until you're in the middle of one and you're already 90+ pages into a book and you're sort of half sunk into the sand and you find yourself thinking, "Where has this place been all my life?"

And it was pretty much the perfect day off, too. Temps in the low 80's, low humidity, bright sunshine but not too hot, hardly anybody on the beach really, nice warm water, waves a little rough but nothing we couldn't handle. If you open the dictionary to "perfection," there is probably a picture of a day just like that.

I'm not the sort of person who normally just takes off on a Wednesday, just because, but you know what? I can be convinced.

Salty Piece Of Land

More pictures from the beach, because of reasons.

Boogie boarding: you're doing it wrong. And still, somehow, doing it right.

Shae says that at the next Olympics she's going to win first place in all the swimming events. I don't think she'll be ready for Rio in 2016, but maybe by 2024 she'll be the new Missy Franklin. And if that is the case, I hope that when Costas and company does a package on "how it all began," they include this picture.

Somebody is not sure whether 64°F is quite warm enough for civilized people. (Glad it wasn't just me.)

Now I really wish that I had put Shae in her suit that matches Makayla's. This is what I get for letting her pick her own clothes out - my perfect shot is ruined. RUINED.

We did a lot of jumping. Shae likes to jump. I hope she never discovers the pole vault, or we'll all be in trouble.

Those eyelashes KILL ME DEAD, every time.

It should be reassuring to me that EVERY.SINGLE.FAMILY.PICTURE. turns out like this, because it means it is not operator error, and yet. AND YET.

THOSE EYELASHES AGAIN. Gaaaah. Who do I need to speak to about an upgrade?

Knee Deep

This post needs a soundtrack, so here you go. (And bear in mind that this might be the only time you'll ever see me voluntarily linking to a country song, although technically I am only doing this because Jimmy Buffett is involved. Jimmy Buffett > everything.)

We went to the beach yesterday, for the first time all summer. I am decidedly A Beach Person, so it was like a kind of homecoming.

Except that I, personally, prefer coming home to ocean temperatures that are above 64°F. That is too cold for a mere mortal such as myself.

Shae, of course, had no such compunctions. There was A Whole Big Ocean there, and she was going to be in it for as much and as long as possible.

Getting up at 5am on a Sunday to schlep yourself and your husband and your five-year-old and a trunkful of beach-related gear and soggy sandwiches 2½ hours to New Jersey is not everybody's idea of a good time.

I can sit here and complain until the end of time, but the truth is, the beach is my happy place, my sacred space. My psychological reset button is a salty piece of land.

And already, we're making plans to go back. I have a final exam tonight and a paper due Wednesday, and then I have two weeks off before the fall semester starts. The state park where we like to go for our beach day trips is open all year.

We'll be back, as soon as possible, knee deep in the water somewhere. The Powerball jackpot is over $300 million, so maybe we can make the change in latitude permanent.

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.

Beach Blanket Bingo

Long before my grandfather passed, literally weeks prior, my sister and I made plans to go to the beach with the kids for a day while she was on vacation for a week. Our pre-scheduled day turned out to be the day before the funeral.

I don't know about you, but I think the only day better than any random nice day to go to the beach is the day before one of the worst days of your life. So we went through with our plans, got up super-early, left before first light, and spent the day chasing seagulls in the sand.

We also played in the surf for a really long time and learned that it is really hard to set up a beach umbrella plus a sun tent when there are no big dudes or engineers around, as there often are when we go to the beach (as my husband is a big dude, and he and my other sister are both engineers).

Thank goodness for my cousin Greg and his lovely girlfriend Taylor, who actually is an engineer-in-training, and who met us at the beach later in the morning. Taylor made quick work of the tent, and because we had additional "adult" supervision (more like "addled" supervision, as my high school French teacher might have said), I was able to sit in my chair and play the part of my mother, chain-smoking and reading my trashy romance novel while the kids ate fistfuls of sand and built "sand castles" by basically dumping water on themselves. (I don't know either; my husband is the engineer, remember?)

What -- you don't take a big bathtub-sized plastic bucket with you to the beach, too, so the kids can sit there and look at it? My kid wouldn't use it for anything because she didn't want to "get it dirty." (It's from the dollar store or some such -- it has already suffered worse indignities, no doubt.)

But, as we always do, we had a great time, and now I am really, really stoked for vacation, in just 16 more days. (WHOO!) Maybe exponentially so more, now that I know there is a White Castle nearby. (Half an hour or so, BUT STILL. White Castle. COME ON. Large quantities of tiny cheeseburgers RULE.)

(Also: more pics tomorrow, including some of my niece, who remains the most adorable niece in the whole wide world and just gets cuter all the time.)