A blogging friend of mine has a saying, “Good for life, bad for blog,” meaning that turmoil can be more interesting to read about than simple happiness. This is certainly part of the appeal of the Series of Unfortunate Events books Noah and I are reading this summer. The children are orphaned in the first chapter of the first book and pursued throughout the series by the evil Count Olaf, who wants to steal their fortune. It gets considerably more complicated than that later in the series, but we’re just finishing up Book 4 now.

We spent this past week at Rehoboth Beach with my mom, Beth’s mom and her Aunt Carole and there really weren’t very many unfortunate events. No life-threatening emergencies back home like last year (see my 8/14/08 post), not even a string of cold, rainy days like the year before (see 8/25/07). No one even got a sunburn. I’ve got a nice tan and June has a cute new spray of freckles on her nose. We celebrated an anniversary and a birthday. Of course, there was some occasional misbehavior on the kids’ part (they’re not angels) and I didn’t get much reading done (long uninterrupted reading was one of the joys of a beach week for me pre-kids) and there was one night of really poor sleep, but overall it was pretty much unrelieved happiness. If this sounds too tedious to bear, feel free to look at the pictures and skip the rest. I’ll understand.

Saturday: Day 1

“Do you want to go down to the beach, June?” I asked.

“Beach! Beach! Beach!” June shouted, wriggling with happiness. It had been a long, trying day for her. We’d promised the beach, but we’d been packing all morning and driving all afternoon, with no beach to show for it so far.

The walk down to the beach from the rental house was longer than I remembered and June needed to stop and pick up gravel from every driveway we passed, so it took us over twenty minutes to get to the water. To return home by six, as I’d promised, we would have needed to turn around and go straight back. Of course, we didn’t. We built sand castles, which June gleefully stomped, pressed the green plastic duck mold into the wet sand to make “a duck and its friends” and stood by the water’s edge with the waves running over our feet. We were just barely getting them wet because June was unsure about the waves. I was thinking we should really get going when she said, “Let’s go in!” meaning let’s wade further in. We did, but I told her it was almost time to go and then there was crying, (And no, it wasn’t me.) She recovered quickly and as we walked up the long sandy path through the dunes and the scrub pines she said, “I want to come back tomorrow and the next day and the next day.” It was a quote from a library book we have out (Caillou at the Beach), but I think the sentiment was heartfelt.

Sunday: Day 2

The next morning June was begging to “go for a walk on the board.” I suspected she had an ulterior motive so I asked her if she wanted to go to Candy Kitchen. She did. We were staying a couple blocks north of the boardwalk and Candy Kitchen is right at its center so it would be an even longer walk than the day before. I decided to take the stroller. Noah was still in the new leaf pajamas YaYa made for him, alternately working on a page from his summer math packet and chatting with YaYa and Aunt Carole. He didn’t want to leave the house, so June and I set out alone again, as we would many times over the course of the week. It was a long walk but we were rewarded with a shell-shaped lollipop for June, watermelon taffy for me, and chocolate-peanut butter fudge for the house. Afterward we tried out the coin-operated elephant and clown car on the boardwalk but June found the jerky movement alarming and asked to get off before the rides were over. Next we played on the beach some more. I showed her how to make a dribble castle and she got the hang of it quickly. We left the beach around 10:45, came home, showered, played and ate lunch. June told Beth she wanted to fly a kite on the beach and Beth said they could do it later. June plopped down on the couch next to her, took a few licks from her lollipop, looked at her and said, “Is it later now?”

My mom arrived around 3:30, just as June and I were about to make our third trip to the beach. (Noah, YaYa and Carole were already at the boardwalk and Beth was resting after cooking a delicious dinner of gazpacho, corn and avocado salad and spinach dip.) Mom got into her suit and came with us, which meant I got to swim for the first time. As she and June were playing a wave washed almost all the way over June, an experience she later declared, “a wittle bit scary.” After that, she sat solemnly on Mom’s towel until she was recovered enough to go roll in the sand and get herself almost entirely covered.

After dinner, we headed out to the boardwalk for frozen custard. Noah, Carole and I ventured down to the beach. Noah was running around in the surf, fully clothed and still holding his cone. I let him. “This is so fun!” he kept yelling. I felt like the meanest mom ever when I pointed out it was almost bedtime and made him leave.

Monday: Day 3

There are a couple awkward times of day for people with small children vacationing with people without them, but the most challenging one is probably the long hours between when the first child wakes and the last adult does. We were always trying to shush the kids but it never did much good. At one point on Monday morning I asked Noah in an exasperated tone what was so hard about remembering to keep quiet.

“I’m not very good at remembering,” he answered quite earnestly.

We tried to keep the kids quiet. I got Noah to read and we all drew pictures of animal-vegetable combinations. (Noah got the idea from Jack Prelutsky’s Scranimals—http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780688178192/Scranimals/index.aspx). I was particularly proud of my Pelicarrot. The pouch was a fat orange carrot and the wings were carrot greens. Eventually, we decided to take the kids down to the beach to fly a kite. By the time we were ready to go, Mom and YaYa were already up but Carole had managed to sleep through the din, so we left her to slumber in peace.

As we approached the beach, Beth noticed a potential flaw in the plan. There was no wind. I said maybe it would be better down by the water, but it wasn’t. The kite wouldn’t fly. After a half hour of trying to get it into the air and watching the kids play and scanning the water for dolphins–we saw a few–Beth said, “I think I’ve had enough of this.” This is a sentence I can’t imagine uttering at the beach under any circumstances, let alone after a measly half hour, but Beth’s not a beach person. It’s a mixed marriage.

She wanted to get herself a coffee but I asked if she could wait long enough so I could have a quick dip. June started to wail as I was in the water. I wasn’t sure why. It didn’t bother her when I swam the day before. I pointed to June from the water and made a questioning gesture. Beth pointed back at me emphatically. I shrugged and decided to ignore the crying for a few minutes, but it did take a good bit of the enjoyment out of my swim. June didn’t recover her equilibrium, even after I came out of the water, so Beth took her back to the house. Beth never got her coffee that day, but Noah and I did have a lovely hour together. He told me about the chapter of The Miserable Mill he read that morning and we watched the ships on the water and the pelicans in the sky. We played in the surf, discussed gravity and the pull of the moon and how tides and waves are made. We talked about how he might come swimming with me in the ocean when he’s a stronger swimmer. He seemed happy with this plan as long as it was comfortably in the future. He asked me what it feels like to stand with a big wave forming behind you. I went further out, stood in front of a gathering wave and came back to describe as precisely as I could how the wave pulls you toward it, lifts you up and drops you down. On the walk home I quizzed him on his times tables and we made up silly songs including this one about a French Jewish cow, sung to the tune of “Frère Jacques”: “Rosh Hashanah, Rosh Hashanah. Dormez Moo! Dormez Moo!” We sang it over and over again at the top of our lungs. I’m so infrequently alone with Noah I sometimes forget how fun it can be.

After lunch and June’s nap, Mom took June to Candy Kitchen and I met them down on the beach. When I found them, June was seated in the stroller on the sand, eating Swedish fish from a clear plastic box with a tiny sliver scoop. I wondered if the elaborate packaging had influenced her choice. We went through the normal routine of castles and playing in the water. June complained, not for the first time, that “the water won’t let us in,” meaning the waves wouldn’t. At one point she found a hole some older kids had dug near the water’s edge and she sat in it, letting the waves run over her legs. She and Mom dug their own hole (for a bunny) further up on the beach while I swam and June got close enough to some gulls to note the red markings on their beaks and legs. Finally she impressed Mom by bending from the waist until her head touched the sand and holding the pose for a long while (not long enough for me to get a picture though). Shortly after five, she was ready to go home so we washed our feet at a footbath (always fun for a small child) and she got settled in the stroller with her Swedish fish-in-a-box and we were off.

Tuesday: Day 4

“I thought your anniversary was in the winter,” my mother said when I told her Beth and I were going on separate gift-buying errands. I explained the anniversary of our commitment ceremony is in January, but our dating anniversary is July 15. She said she couldn’t believe we bought gifts for two anniversaries.

I shrugged. “We like anniversaries,” I said.

She said it must be a female thing and implied that men could not be coaxed into buying that many gifts. I don’t know if they can or not, having never tried.

I was also hoping to find a birthday present for my mom on this outing. Her birthday was Saturday and we were planning to celebrate it on Friday since we’d be packing up and leaving on Saturday morning. I complained to Beth I had no idea what to buy, that I’d hoped she’d see something and comment on it, but so far she hadn’t been in a shopping or even window-shopping mood.

Meanwhile June was begging me to take her to the beach. I explained we needed to run some errands first. No, no, she wanted to go to the beach. As is often the case, however, her mood improved when I got her out of the house. She waited patiently while I picked up a card and a gift certificate for a massage for Beth. I sprung for the hot stone massage—buying gifts at the beach makes me generous. We crossed paths with Beth as she was coming out of Café a Go-Go, having gotten the café con leche she wanted the day before. June and I were headed into a coffee shop across the street, which does not serve coffee as heavenly but which is also not run by a stern Mexican woman who does not approve of unruly children. I kissed Beth before we went our separate ways. She tasted of the cinnamon they put in the café con leche at Café a Go-Go. I resolved to get over there myself sometime later in the week.

Our errands done, June and I strolled toward the beach. We passed two Candy Kitchens on they way. When I said we were not going in, June said, completely in earnest, “ Is there no candy in there?”

More splashing in the surf ensued. Of course, on this day when I was dressed for errands and not the beach (I’d changed June into her suit in the coffee shop) June wanted to go in deeper than she had been and jump in every wave. She said she wanted to float a boat in the water. I thought about what toys could serve as boats and asked if floating the duck mold in a hole we dug would do. She agreed. We dug a hole and waited for the sea to rush in. When it did I set the mold down and was pleased at how boat-like it looked, floating convex side down. But now June wanted it to look duck-like, with the body aligned to look like a swimming duck, not floating on its side like a deceased duck, or a boat if you were inclined to look at it that way. Of course it wouldn’t float upright. As I pondered this problem, June solved it, by waiting for wave and holding the duck in it.

On the way home we passed the kite shop at the end of the boardwalk and I realized my mother had mentioned something she liked and it had not registered. She’d been complaining about how heavy her beach chair was and saying she’d like an aluminum frame one. Once when we’d walked by the kite shop, she’d found one she liked in the chair display, but decided it was too expensive. Voila. Perfect gift.

I didn’t get it then because we’d left the beach later than I intended, then made an impulse stop for Thrasher’s fries (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64536-2004May28.html). June was warm, tired and had a bellyful of fries. Predictably she started to nod off a few blocks from home and when I pushed the stroller up to the house, she was sound asleep.

In the afternoon, when Mom took the kids to Funland, I went back and got the chair. I left it in her room, with a note, as a surprise. She didn’t find it until she went to bed.

Wednesday: Day 5

On Wednesday, while Beth was having her massage, June (my best beach buddy) and I spent another morning at the beach. We made more dribble castles and the duck had more adventures and we took a walk. (“The ocean is following us. The ocean wants to come,” she’d observe whenever a wave lapped our feet.) On this walk, June finally picked a large white pebble for YaYa, who had requested one. As we sat on the wet sand, with the waves rushing over our legs and splashing up over our stomachs, a passerby stopped and complimented me for not overprotecting June and for “letting her get used to the water.” She said she’d seen kids with floaties on, with their feet barely in the water. I’ve seen the opposite, though—parents dragging terrified toddlers into the surf. This always makes me furious. Every kid’s comfort level is different and I think it’s our job to encourage our children while respecting their limits. As for myself, I remember being small, older than June but not by much, riding on my father’s shoulders in the ocean, so deep in that the water sometimes went over his head. He was holding on tight, though, and it never occurred to me to be afraid.

There was a comic moment shortly after we came home and finished our showers. The lawn service came on the one day I forgot to bring the towels inside the outdoor shower and left them on the back porch stairs. I sent a naked June out to retrieve them and when she heard the lawn mower start up, out of sight, but quite close around the corner of the house, she dashed away, terrified, taking the towels with her and leaving me, dripping and naked in the shower and wondering what to do. I stuck my head out the door and called to her. Very hesitantly, she came back and we hastily wrapped up and went inside.

After lunch, YaYa and Carole took Noah to the beach while, Beth, June and I napped. Mom told me Noah was really active in the water, jumping around and going in deep, up to his chin at times. I was surprised to hear it since he’s always been cautious in the water and he’s not as good a swimmer as I was at his age, despite years of on and off swimming lessons. He’s been asking to start his lessons up again, though, so maybe he’s ready to turn a corner. I would really like that.

Later in the afternoon, Beth, YaYa, Carole and the kids went for a bike ride/scooter ride/walk on the Junction and Breakwater Trail in Cape Henlopen State Park (http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/documents/magazine/07Spr_DES_JunctionBreakwaterTrail.pdf). Beth rented a bike trailer for June and they rode through woods and farmland and marshes. They even picked raspberries. June was so enthusiastic about the berries that Beth and Noah left her behind with YaYa and Carole in the berry patch while they rode ahead.

Meanwhile, Mom and I lounged on the beach, she in her new chair and me on my new beach mat (a birthday present from YaYa). We talked and read and watched an osprey fly over the sea with a fish in its talons and I went for a swim. The water was calm. With no big waves to play in, I decided to float. I closed my eyes and bobbed up and down and felt the wind above and the water below. I could hear the whispering sound of the sand shifting several feet underneath me.

We split up for dinner. The older generation took the younger generation out for crepes and ice cream while Beth and I had our anniversary dinner at Planet X (http://www.planetxcafe.com/), followed by coffee and dessert at Café a Go-Go. Beth got me a book of essays about all fifty states (http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061470905/State_by_State/index.aspx) to remind me of our younger days when we traveled to all fifty states. We only finished four years ago, but most of these trips took place in our twenties. We talked about how strange it seems that fourteen of our twenty-two years together (nearly two-thirds) were pre-kids, and that June’s life has really been just a blip in that timeline, although of course, it doesn’t feel that way. Sometimes it’s good to remember the couple we were before we were a family.

We came home, put the kids to bed (Mom bathed June for us) and then the grownups sat on the porch, talking about matters sad (Mom and Jim recently gave up their two new cats after five months of trying to get their old cat to accept them and the old cat is seriously ill with cancer) and matters happy (YaYa and Carole’s sister Susan welcomed a new granddaughter that very day).

Thursday: Day 6

The next morning there was an early morning ice cream tasting at Browse About Books (http://www.browseaboutbooks.com/), a promotion to get people into the store I suppose. It ended at 9:00 a.m. and I couldn’t get enthusiastic about ice cream so early in the day (it not being the Fourth of July after all) but almost every one else was and I had downtown errands so we left Carole at the house and the rest of our party set out around 8:30. I bought a card for my mom when she was in another part of the store and when she left and the kids, Beth and YaYa settled in for story time, I peeled off from the group and went to pick out a birthday cake for my mom at the bakery. I deliberated between a mermaid cake and a lighthouse cake and chose the lighthouse.

I returned to the bookstore and found the stroller but puzzlingly, no relatives. It’s a big store and I figured they were browsing about somewhere, but after searching all over and not hearing Noah’s voice (that was the odd part—where Noah is, you hear him), I decided they must have gone to another store and left the stroller behind. I gave up on finding them and went back to the house. I found Noah and YaYa there. He’d gotten bored and they’d left story time early. I started to wonder if Beth and June had been in the store all along. They were, as it turned out. After waiting fretfully around the house, hoping they weren’t waiting for me, I finally headed down to the beach around 11:10 and I met them less than a block from the house. Beth had not been expecting me back at all and was blissfully unaware of the mix-up. She handed June off to me and we made a quick pre-lunch beach run.

I had no toys with me so I kept answering questions like “Do you have the ducky mold?”—“No, because I didn’t know you were coming,” ad naseum. June was exasperated when I put sun block on her in the parking lot, since we usually do it at home. (“How can grownups put sun block on people at the beach?” she wanted to know.) She was insistent about dribble castles despite the obstacle of having no pail. I decided to forget about keeping her clothes dry and we dug a hole close enough to the water that the waves ran in and we used it as a reservoir for runny sand. The only problem was that each time a wave came and filled it, it washed away all the castles we’d made. We made a game of it, though, to avoid disappointment. I even used the destruction of the castles as a timer. (“When the waves knock over all the castles, it will be time to go home.”)

At home I fixed lunch for June and left the kids in Beth’s care while Mom and I went out to lunch at a restaurant with boardwalk seating. I had steamed clams, one of my once or twice yearly departures from vegetarianism. When we returned, around two, I was surprised to find June was up unusually early from her nap. Beth and YaYa took the kids on another afternoon adventure to a water park on Route 1 (http://www.funatjunglejims.com/) where they rode in boats and went on slides and ate ice cream and had a fine time. I stayed behind and went to the beach with my mom. I swam, we talked and I read on the beach for the first tine all week and then I swam again. We came home and had a dinner of leftovers (Carole’s signature brown rice bake, YaYa’s baked macaroni and cheese and the Thai curry I brought home from Planet X). June was too tired to eat her dinner and just lay on the couch clutching her stuffed panda or sat on my lap while I ate. When she threatened to nod off right then and there, we decided to put her to bed posthaste, but we weren’t quick enough to avoid some miserable I-am-so-tired-all-I-can-do-is-wail meltdowns along the way. The upside is that both kids were in bed by 8:10. If I’d known what was coming we would have gone to bed earlier. June woke around 10:30, shortly after Beth and I had retired for the night…

Friday: Day 7

And then we were all up for the next two and half hours. June was restless and all over the bed. I kept trying to inch away from her flailing arms and legs. I tried sleeping with my head at the foot of the bed, a trick that often works, and several times I switched places with her, going back and forth between the bed and the air mattress where she had started the night. She kept following me. (It is one of the ironies of my parenting life that I can’t sleep with anyone touching me and I have co-slept with two kids into the preschool years.) At one point with all the moving around I knocked a lamp and a full glass of water off my bedside table and another time my pillow got misplaced and I had to go to the couch to get a replacement. If not for the skylight and all the windows in the living room, I would have stayed there. Before I left in search of a new pillow, I was rooting around under Beth’s thinking it might have got under there and she cursed at me, a very uncommon occurrence. I was about to take the air mattress to the back porch when June fell asleep. Shockingly, she was up for the day at 6:30, and quite chipper. I was not so chipper but I was awake for the day, too. Beth managed to doze until 8:00 or so. We never did figure out what was wrong with June. She might have been hot. It was a warm night and because it had been cool at night all week, we hadn’t put the air conditioning on.

My mom decided to leave the beach a day early to join her ailing cat and her worried husband. She took the kids on a morning outing. They returned with a toy each (a robot crab for Noah and a stuffed animal for June identified by various members of our party as a raccoon, a possum or a bushbaby—http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/vecase/behavior/Spring2006/Rogers/bushbaby%203.jpg). June says she picked the mystery animal “because I didn’t have enough stuffed animals.” I think she was serious, despite the fact that both the toy box and the doll crib at home are overflowing with stuffed animals. Throughout the day she could be seen hugging it and declaring her love to it.

Everyone gathered for lunch and birthday cake to see off my mom. Noah liked the card, which pictured cows in birthday hats asking, “Got cake?” (“And we do!” he said.) June was very impatient for Mom to open the card. I had everyone sign it and she’d added her own scribble, which she told us said, “Happy Birthday!” “I drewed in it,” she said, just so everyone would be clear. I expected June might melt down because of her bad night’s sleep, but it was Noah who had to be escorted, crying, from the table. (He wanted his robot crab to have its own slice of cake and we thought crumbs would gum up its works.) He recovered enough to return, eat cake and show Mom a photograph of her birthday present online. It’s a painting he made at art camp at the Purple School last week. We failed to bring it but fortunately Lesley put pictures of some of the kids’ artwork up on Facebook.

After we said our goodbyes to Mom, June and I settled in for a long nap and Beth somehow found the energy to take Noah to play miniature golf. She reports he was very well behaved and played a good game. She just barely beat him.

June and I had a quick trip down to the beach. When we arrived at the beach we saw lifeguards doing pushups in the sand. “They’re doing yoga on the beach!” June declared. We dug in the sand and played a game in which she piled wet sand on the duck, who lamented how dirty it was getting and cheered for the waves when they came to clean it off. This was amusing for longer than you might think.

We had dinner out, at Grotto Pizza, and bought some t-shirts and walked home via the boardwalk. “Why is it our last summer vacation ever?” June wanted to know on the way home. The last full day of this vacation, she meant, but she sounded as sad as if she spoke the literal truth. I knew how she felt.

Saturday: Day 8

I stumbled out to the dining area of the house on Saturday morning to the sad sight of Beth filling out a survey for the realty and Noah writing a postcard for Sasha. So, it was true, we really were leaving.

We packed, said goodbye to YaYa and Carole, packed some more and checked out. June and I played on the beach one last time while Beth and Noah hung out in a coffee shop. Then Beth watched the kids while I had my last swim. The waves were tremendous, the best of the whole week. After I swam, we ate leftover pizza on a bench on the boardwalk, took an illicit shower in the outdoor shower of a downtown motel and drove off, leaving our beach week behind.

And that was the really unfortunate event.

For those of you who have observed that I sometimes have a tendency to go on a wee bit longer than strictly necessary, here’s Noah’s version of our week at Rehoboth Beach, written for his summer homework: “On my trip I went to CANDY KITCHEN and I bought some teeth. I ate at Grotto Pizza with my family out in the back patio. We won a shark.” That pretty much covers the highlights. However, for those of you who crave more detail, here’s What We Did on Our Summer Vacation. Get yourself a glass of lemonade. It’s a long one.

Day 1

Eating pizza on the boardwalk, Noah was dazzled by the gastronomical choices before him. He wanted ice cream, no funnel cake, no gelato. We explained, not for the first time, that since we’d stopped at Dairy Queen on the drive to the beach and the rental house refrigerator was full of fruit from the farmers’ market, we were not getting dessert at the boardwalk.

“How about fruit-flavored gelato?” he suggested.

Day 2

Sunday was our first full day at the beach. After a breakfast of coffee shop fare eaten on the boardwalk, Beth and June headed back to the house for her morning nap, while Noah and I dove into a sand castle, sand pyramid, sand apartment building, sand Costan Rican rainforest village complete with sand volcano-making extravaganza. Noah has long enjoyed making and immediately smashing sand castles. In previous years his imaginary kingdoms were plagued by malicious and/or clumsy giants who destroyed the unfortunate royals’ fortresses. Since receiving a book on medieval castles for his birthday, however, he prefers more historically accurate siege tactics. Tunneling under the castle until it collapses is his favorite.

Back at the house we worked on some of his summer reading homework while we waited for Beth and June to return from grocery shopping. Beth reports that on being strapped into her car seat, June said hopefully, “Go beach?” But she had to wait.

After lunch, I napped with June while Beth and Noah took in the attractions at Funland (http://www.funlandrehoboth.com/) and played miniature golf. It was five-thirty by the time June and I met up with them on the boardwalk. Noah excitedly showed me the golf ball-sized eyeball he’d purchased with two weeks’ allowance. Beth went back to the house to cook dinner. I promised to follow with the kids in a half hour. Finally, June go to “go beach.” She was excited, dashing all around on the sand and pointing to the “ducks” (seagulls) she saw everywhere. Noah was shocked and dismayed to learn I couldn’t chase her and make sand castles with him at the same time.

“I stayed because I thought it would be fun and this isn’t fun,” he declared, insisting we return to the house. I told him we had to stay so Beth could cook in peace and because June and I were having fun. He responded by laying face down in the sand for ten minutes, an impressively long sulk for Noah. When he rejoined us wordlessly, I held June up in front of my face and began singing a song he learned at drama camp.

“My name is Juney and you know what I got?”

A delighted grin broke out over Noah’s face. “What have you got?” he sang back.

“I got a brother who is hotter than hot!”

“How hot is hot?”

“Batman and Superman…”

“Uh huh? Uh huh?”

“Can’t do it like Noah can!”

I won him over. We ran and played in the surf until it was time to go. June was utterly fearless about the waves, charging toward them until I caught her and swept her up, dangling her feet in the churning water. Once I was too late and the wave knocked her onto her bottom. She was sitting up to her chest in foamy water and laughing. When the half hour was up, Noah helpfully gathered up the sand toys as I attempted to walk away from the ocean carrying his sandy sister in her waterlogged romper and jacket. (It was unseasonably cold so I’d brought her to the beach dressed.) She wriggled and cried and shrieked in protest. Once we were halfway up the beach she sobbed, “Go walk,” which is what she sometimes says when she wants to be put down to walk. I set her down and she pulled her hand out of mine and dashed back in the direction of the water. She’s a girl after my own beach-loving heart.

Day 3

As we headed for the beach, Noah asked, “Can we make sand castles?”

“Yes,” I answered, possibly with a trifle less enthusiasm than the day before. I like making sand castles as much as the next person, but Noah’s capacity for this activity is nearly limitless, or so it seems to me after a couple of hours.

We did make castles, but the main construction project of the day turned out to be digging holes. Noah wanted a deep hole, oval in shape. We alternated five-minute turns with his biggest shovel. This plan afforded me five-minute increments of sitting on my towel, sipping my takeout café con leche and staring at the ocean. Plus the digging would provide Noah with the joint and muscle input we’re supposed to make sure he gets. It seemed ideal. But after a while the sides of the hole started to cave in and Noah hit a particularly hard-packed area of sand, both of which impeded his progress. He began to cry in frustration. I suggested a few times that he take a break from the project until he felt able to continue with equanimity. After the third time or so, he actually listened. He didn’t say anything, but he stopped digging and set to work burying the long shovel handle with handfuls of sand, then reaching his hands into the loose sand to retrieve it. This proved soothing enough that he was able to resume digging after a few minutes. When the hole was finished to his satisfaction, he jumped in and instructed me to bury him up to his waist. I was a villain, luring the superhero into my trap.

“How does it feel?” I asked, breaking out of character.

“Heavy,” he said.

“Do you think you can get out or do you need me to dig you out?”

In response, he leapt out of the hole, sand and lanky legs flying through the air. For a moment, he really did look like a superhero.

Day 4

“Drought all summer and now this,” Beth muttered as she rummaged through the refrigerator at breakfast. After two days of overcast skies and drizzle, we woke to a hard rain on Tuesday morning. It was the kind of day pre-kids I might have spent reading on the beach, wrapped in a beach towel and camped out under the boardwalk or in one of the boardwalk gazebos. As it turned out, I did spend much of it reading, but not the Stephen King and E. Annie Proulx novels I’d brought with me. After her morning nap, June approached me with a board book. “Ree!” she pleaded. So I did, again and again.

Shortly afterward, Beth and Noah returned from some outlet shopping with a pair of blue and white-checkered sneakers for Noah. I tried to use the sneakers to open up a conversation about school starting next week as we walked home from Funland that afternoon. I’d tried to bring it up earlier in case he was worried, but he didn’t seem interested. Was he excited about school starting? No. Were there any friends he hoped would be in his class? Not really.

“Those sneakers will be good for gym class,” I ventured. “I bet it will be hard at first to remember what special you have on which days. I’ll be saying, ‘Remember your sneakers’ on Tuesdays and you’ll have to tell me you have gym on Thursday or Friday or whenever you have it. Then on Friday, I’ll say, ‘Have fun in library’ when you really have it on Mondays or Wednesdays.”

He looked at me and said, “I think it’s going to be harder for you than for me, Mommy.”

We began work on his summer reading homework in earnest once we got back to the house. At the very beginning of the summer, during the space of a couple of June’s naps, Noah tore through the two thick math workbooks he’d been assigned. I decided instead of giving him a schedule for the reading homework, I’d let him work at his own pace. It was the no-nag plan. Surely someday he’d just pick it up and do it as he had with the math. When he’s motivated he can be a fast worker, but when he isn’t, the simplest task takes ages. (Toward the end of the school year we received a report from the kindergarten team leader who had come to observe him in class. Depending on your point of view, it’s either a hilarious or heart-breaking blow-by-blow of everything he did—suck his thumb and stare into space, drop and retrieve pencils, look at others’ work—during a twenty-five minute period during which he was supposed to be writing in his journal and ended up writing not a single word.) Since I was home in the afternoons and I speak Spanish, I’d supervised Noah’s homework all last year and I was ready for a break from my role as taskmistress. But as June bled into July and July into August and the reading homework remained untouched, I started to get nervous. (Ironically, during this period, he rapidly completed the public library’s Reading Road Trip program (http://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/lkstmpl.asp?url=/content/libraries/summerreading/index.asp). I can’t say I blame him. The prizes—free pizza from Pizza Hut, an ice cream sundae from McDonald’s, ice cream and a free carnival ride at the Montgomery County Fair, a gift certificate from Barnes and Noble, etc.—were a lot more enticing than a party at school.

We sat on the screened porch and read for much of the afternoon. I read him a Magic Tree House book (#28: High Tide in Hawaii). We read a Curious George book, passing it back forth, taking turns reading alternating pages. We read a book of fairy tales that was actually designed to be read by two readers, from the You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You series (http://www.hachettebookgroupusa.com/books/50/0316146110/index.html).

As we read, I took pride in how effectively Noah tackled the hard words and how instead of just decoding the sounds, he reads with expression. I also noted how he would often pause a long time before reading. Was he scanning ahead? Woolgathering? Who knows? I hope his teachers will be patient enough to wait for him because when he does read, it’s worth the wait.

After we read, it was time for Noah to write about the books we read. It’s really the writing that held up Noah’s progress in the reading homework. He loves to be read to and is getting better and reading himself and liking it better. Writing is still a chore for him, though. He doesn’t like to do it and when he has to he tries to enliven a dull activity by making the letters “fancy.” The boy is a born calligrapher. He adds so many curlicues and little pictures inside the letters that the results are often scarcely legible. And writing just the title and the author a book can easily take a half an hour.

As often as I find myself urging him to just write clearly and plainly so he can finish, I end up secretly admiring the results—the H in Hawaii drawn as two hula dancers, the i’s like stretched out leis. I wonder what his teachers will make of these illustrated manuscripts when he turns them in. Will they puzzle over them in frustration, struggling to read the letters, or will they recognize his color-outside-the-lines spirit in them and strive to nurture it?

Day 5

Wednesday dawned rainy and cold again so during June’s morning nap I took Noah to the T-shirt Factory and got him a hooded sweatshirt. We’d failed to pack any warm clothes for him and while he wasn’t complaining, I hated seeing him brave the elements in a t-shit and shorts every day. He chose a decal with the words “Rehoboth Beach, Delaware: Just Chillin,’” and some rather incongruous palm trees on it and watched with interest as the salesclerk applied it to the plain white hooded sweatshirt he’d chosen off the rack. He put it on, commenting on the funny smell of the freshly applied decal and we went for a walk on the boardwalk. I’d hoped to walk the whole one-mile length of it, but I’d promised Noah a treat after the walk and once we were quite near the appointed coffee shop, he discovered he was hungry. Could we stop now? I bought him a pineapple juice and a cinnamon twist pastry, got a latte for myself and we settled ourselves at a high table with our books and pencils and papers. I jotted down a rough draft of my blog while he worked on reading homework. At the exact moment I was describing his class observation, I looked up and noticed he had dropped his pencil, clambered down from the stool, removed his crocs and was trying to pick up the wayward pencil with his bare toes, without much luck.

Shortly after I got him back on track, Beth and June walked in the door. We switched kids, Beth staying with Noah to supervise his homework while I bolted for the boardwalk with June. I got to finish my walk, pushing June in the stroller until she struggled to get out and walking hand in hand with her until she climbed back into the stroller. I was considering having lunch out and scanning menus, not paying much attention when June pitched one of her sneakers overboard. It was a pretty short stretch of boardwalk between the last place I’d checked her feet and where I noticed that one of her shoes was missing, so I was hopeful I could find it. But even though we canvassed the area several times, the little blue shoe was nowhere to be found. It was inevitable, I supposed. We’ve already driven all the way to Gaithersburg, to the Ride On bus (http://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/tsvtmpl.asp?url=/content/dpwt/transit/index.asp) Lost and Found to retrieve one of those shoes. She must have been destined never to outgrow them. I gave up on the shoe and decided there was time to play in the sand before heading back to the house for lunch.

But June did not want to play in the sand. She wanted to play in the water. Never mind it was chilly and she wasn’t wearing her bathing suit, but the only clean, dry long-sleeved shirt she had left. She made a beeline for the shore. She was in shorts so I wondered if I could hold her hand and keep her far back enough so only her feet got wet. No dice. She pulled her hand away from mine angrily and kept charging toward the waves. It wasn’t going to work. I scooped her up and walked back to the stroller. June writhed and howled. For a while I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to get her into the 5-point harness, but she let down her guard for a second and I pounced. Click. Click. She was in. This did not improve her mood, and wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t have a pacifier. She screamed for fifteen minutes straight, giving it up as a bad job only minutes from the rental house.

Beth left to get a massage. I made lunch for the kids and the three of us snuggled in bed and watched Between the Lions. (It was going to be a free-free week for Noah, but I needed a break so we made a one-day exception.) In the mid-afternoon, Andrea, who was spending the rest of the week with us, arrived. Noah was happy to see her and immediately recruited her to play his Junior Labrynith board game (http://www.funagain.com/control/product/~product_id=000697/~affil=TNEL) with him. June hid her face in my chest whenever Andrea looked in her direction, but eventually she warmed up and let her hold her.

Just as Beth was starting to work on dinner (she was the designated cook for the week, a real treat for me), I took June back to the boardwalk to look for the shoe again. Andrea suggested someone might have thrown it out so instead of just scanning the ground for it, I look in each of the numerous trashcans. (You get some odd looks when you do this, but the longer I parent, the more immune I become to odd looks.) Finally, toward the end of the stretch of boardwalk where we’d lost it, perched on top of a garbage can, I spied June’s size 4, navy blue, Velcro-closure sneaker. (The next pair will tie!) It wasn’t in the trash, but I never would have found it if Andrea hadn’t pointed me in the right direction.

I was so happy about finding the shoe (I swear it’s enchanted) that I decided to let June play on the beach again and if she got wet, she got wet. We’d done laundry that afternoon. There were clean, warm clothes at the house. The beach seemed unusually festive. Discouraged from swimming and sunbathing by high surf and cold winds, people were flying kites and building elaborate sand castles in greater numbers than usual.

“Ook” (Look), June cried, pointing to a sea turtle-shaped kite. She wandered from sand castle to sand castle. Her shyness kept her curiosity at bay just enough so that she could see but was in no danger of destroying the fragile creations. There were so many distractions on the sand, I thought we might bypass the whole question of how wet to let her get, but she suddenly remembered the ocean and ran toward it. I caught her and stripped her down to her diaper and let her go. (I think I got some odd looks for that, too, but she’s part mermaid, like her Mama, and sometimes a girl’s got to be who she is.) June ran and laughed in the waves, unmindful of the cold and getting soaked. After a shorter time than usual, she came out. I put on her dry shirt, shorts and socks and got her into the stroller with no fuss.

I got myself a hot mint tea for the return trip and sipped it slowly as we made our way home. When we were a few houses from our own, I could smell the vegetarian barbequed chicken and marinated veggies on the grill. We walked into the yard, where dinner and a doting grandmother awaited.

Day 6

June woke from an unusually long morning nap at 11:35 a.m. Beth, Noah and Andrea had left to go to a coffee shop hours earlier and were still gone. My mom was due to arrive in a half hour. I spent the next hour making, eating and cleaning up from lunch and folding the last of the laundry. Still, no one came to the door. I was puzzled because Beth had agreed to take June to the nearby urgent care to see if it was an ear infection that was causing her to wake screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night every night we’ve been here. The house phone rang, surprising me, since I wasn’t sure anyone in our party even knew the number, but I bolted for it. It was a recording about cable service. I hung up. Another half hour passed before Beth, Noah and Andrea finally wandered in. I was free to go down to the beach, but I felt I ought to stay and greet my mother. I called her cell and left a message. She called back, saying I should go ahead. I hesitated some more. “I don’t understand why you’re not at the beach,” Beth said, impatient perhaps with watching me pace around the house like a caged lion. I left.

If you know me, you probably know I love the beach, but unless you’ve actually been to the beach with me, you may not understand what I mean when I say that. Pre-kids, a day at the beach meant just that. I got up and went straight to the beach, toting a packed lunch if the house was more than a few minutes from the water. I’d come back at dinnertime, returning for an evening walk if possible. I haven’t had a day like that since Noah was born. In fact, this week I hadn’t even had a proper swim yet since Beth wasn’t coming down (she’s not a beach person—it’s a mixed marriage) and I always had one or both kids with me. But now the opportunity was presenting itself.

I waded into the ocean first thing. The air was warmer than it had been all week. The sky was gray, the water was gray and the surf was rough enough to make the swim challenging. I bobbed up and down, sometimes laughing out loud. After a half hour, I was tired so I got out and read. Once the sun had warmed me sufficiently, I bought myself a watermelon shaved ice. When my mother, who had gotten lost near Rehoboth and had to be guided to the house on the phone by Beth, joined me, I looked at my watch. I was surprised to see I’d only been at the beach an hour and fifteen minutes. The time seemed so full. Mom and I sat on the sand and talked for an hour and a half, about the kids, her therapy practice, recent developments in my sister’s life (Will she and her boyfriend find a house to buy? Will she ever have kids?). The conversation was pleasantly unhurried, unlike most of our phone calls. And while I can’t say it was enough time— to swim, to read, to enjoy adult conversation—it was a deeply satisfying break from the never-ending work of parenting. As my mother and I walked back to the house, I found myself hoping not only for more of the same the next day, but also to make some more sand castles with Noah on our last full day at the beach.

Day 7

It turns out four adults to two children is about the right ratio for me to spend an almost perfect day at the beach. Noah and I arrived around nine, and had built just enough sand castles and played just long enough in the water to be looking at each other and wondering “what next?” when my mom arrived and he had a fresh playmate. He found a hole someone else had dug and spent a lot of time jumping into it. Later it was a nest and mom was a bird laying eggs they made out of balls of wet sand. She bought him lunch and took him to Candy Kitchen and Funland while I swam, read and had my own lunch of fried clams in pleasant solitude. I have never explained to Noah that I make some rare exceptions to my vegetarianism. I will eat creatures that never could have looked me in the eye because they don’t have eyes. So far, I only indulge in this dirty little secret when he’s not around. Of course, they saw me on the boardwalk as I was eating and I slammed the Styrofoam container shut until they’d left.

Beth, Andrea and June (who, as Beth insisted all along, does not have an ear infection) put in a brief, post-lunch appearance. A wave that went right over her head drenched June and while she still enjoyed playing in the water after that, she was not as quick to pull her hand out of mine.

Noah and Mom returned from their adventures with a stuffed shark they’d won. Mom was quite excited about winning it until Noah shared his take on it: “We paid a dollar for a shark.” The three of us sat together for a while and he sang her songs he’d learned at drama camp. (Who knew kids still sang “Great Green Gobs of Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts” and “I’m Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee”?) We conducted a taste test of the gummy teeth and gummy brains he’d selected at Candy Kitchen. Mom and I preferred the teeth. Noah liked the brains better.

It was just after four when we went back to the house to get cleaned up for an early dinner. It was the longest continuous stretch of beach time I’ve had since Noah was born and the longest he’s ever lasted. We all went out for pizza and after dinner I bought myself a t-shirt with a chubby mermaid on it. Underneath the mild-mannered exterior of overeducated suburban mom-of-two, I’m still me inside, part wild and of the sea. That will never change.

Day 8

The house was packed and vacated. Mom was already driving back home. We’d planned to stay at the beach for the rest of the morning and leave after lunch to coordinate our departure with the beginning of June’s afternoon nap, but June had refused to take her morning nap, so I was dashing down to the beach for a quick swim while Beth, Andrea, June and Noah waited for me in town.

It was the first really hot day since we’d arrived so the water felt refreshingly cool. The waves were gentle, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to get too sandy because I had nowhere to shower before getting into the car. I swam and floated and rode the glassy smooth waves for fifteen minutes, then reluctantly got out of the water. I stood facing the sea as it washed over my feet and said my silent goodbye. I turned and had walked a half dozen steps toward my towel when an errant wave reached out and caressed my heels.