Category Archives: Travel

Giving Thanks: Food, Water and Love

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The day before Thanksgiving, Noah came home from school with a paper turkey he’d cut out and colored. It had three feathers with the pre-printed words “Doy gracias por” (“I give thanks for”). He’d filled in the blanks with “comida” (“food”), “agua” (“water”) and “mi abuela” (“my grandmother”). He’d included food and water, he explained to me, “because no one can survive” without them. He looked at the last feather. “I have two grandmothers,” he commented, as if I didn’t know. Food, water and love, I thought, that’s why we give thanks.

We drove to Wheeling on Thanksgiving Day, partly to beat the traffic and partly so Noah wouldn’t miss any school. We bought relief from his whining on the trip by listening to three unabridged Magic Tree House audio books. I actually fell asleep for ten to twenty minutes during the last one, even though I normally can’t sleep in the car unless I’m pregnant. I was pretty tired since June had been up for over an hour and a half in the middle of the night. (Unfortunately, this is not an unusual occurrence.) By the end of that wake up she was trying to sing herself back to sleep. Her version of “All the Pretty Little Horses” sounds something like this:

Hush bye, don’t cry
Go seep, baby
(Several lines of unintelligible babble except for the word “cake” pronounced clearly and with great enthusiasm.)

I wonder if this is how I sound to her when I sing it.

Anyway, my fatigue, combined with the astoundingly repetitive adventures of Jack and Annie recounted in the stilted prose of Mary Pope Osbourne knocked me right out. I missed several chapters.

We arrived mid-afternoon and dinner wasn’t until seven, so we had time for the kids to burn off some pent-up energy running around outside and for me to bathe June before we got the kids dressed for dinner. June wore a dress with a black velvet top and a puffy, gold satin skirt that a friend of Andrea’s bought for her. Andrea said she looked just like a doll. Beth’s brother Johnny and I both said, independently of each other, that she looked like the Infanta Margarita in this painting (http://www.artchive.com/meninas.htm). In either case, doll or princess, it was a new look for her.

Johnny organized Thanksgiving dinner, making cooking assignments that spread the work out among the diners. He and his wife Abby did the bulk of the cooking, making the turkey and stuffing, the mashed potatoes and a dish of broiled squash and parsnips; with Beth and me bringing the vegetarian gravy, green bean casserole and brandied sweet potatoes; Beth’s father John making the turkey gravy; and Andrea making the cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. Noah and I made turkey centerpieces out of apples, toothpicks, raisins, green olives and pistachios. Everyone got his or her favorite dish and Andrea exclaimed over and over again how thankful she was to have her children do most of the cooking.

Dinner finished up late so we let Noah and June eat their pie (or in June’s case, just the whipped cream off the top) before everyone else and we hustled them off the bed. I decided to forgo pie so I could get to bed myself. I paused only to put the kids’ cranberry-stained clothes to soak in the bathtub. I wanted everyone to get a good night’s rest. Noah was awake for a while singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” but by 9:30 all three of us were fast asleep in our shared attic bedroom.

June woke at 9:45. I popped the pacifier back in and she went back to sleep. Noah fell out of bed at 10:55. I helped him back in. Beth stayed up late chatting with Johnny and came to bed at 11:20. At last, everyone was settled in. We slept until 3:15, when all hell broke loose.

It started out pretty normal. June woke and wanted to nurse. “Nap!” she insisted when I tried the pacifier. (Nursing and sleeping are so intertwined in her mind that this is her word for nursing.) I was still down on her mat with her when Noah woke at 3:25 and wanted help going to the bathroom. Beth got up to help him. And then neither of the kids went back to sleep.

Around 3:45, Beth and June switched places. The bed was a double, too small for the three of us, and I thought June might sleep better with me, but it took another hour to get her to drop off. Meanwhile, Beth slept fitfully on the mat on the floor and Noah was wide-awake on the airbed next to me. He rolled around in bed. He sat up and watched the numbers change on the digital clock. He made shadow puppets in the light from the nightlight. He sang softly, but audibly, under his breath. He whispered numbers divisible by both two and five to himself. He saw scary shapes in the dark and needed me to drape blankets over them. He got up to go to the bathroom multiple times.

I tried patiently telling him to lie still, be quiet and go to sleep. I tried scolding him. I tried ignoring him. At 6:00 on the dot he jumped out of bed and was dashing around the corner heading for Beth’s mat. I stopped him and he protested it was time for Beth to get up and play with him. He seemed to have genuinely forgotten that he hasn’t been allowed to wake us at 6:00 since July. The new time is 6:30. At 6:30, having just finished nursing June again, I got up to find him some socks (he’d been complaining of cold feet) and a book. I was meaning to banish him downstairs and try to get back to sleep after having been awake for over three hours. But June woke while I was searching for Noah’s suitcase in the dark room and her crying woke Beth and soon the four of us were all downstairs and up for the day.

And that’s how Beth’s forty-first birthday began.

Last year on the evening of the day after Beth’s fortieth birthday, we got even less sleep, at least she and I did. Shortly after going to bed that night she had a gallbladder attack. We were at my mother and stepfather’s house for Thanksgiving and my mom took her to the emergency room while I stayed home with the kids. They were there almost all night. I was sick with worry, thinking it was a heart attack and slept little. I cuddled with June all night, nursing her when she woke. Beth and my mom returned close to dawn with the news that it was her gallbladder and she’d have to have it out but she was going to be okay. When Noah and June woke I quickly got them dressed and fed and out of the house so Beth and my mom could get some sleep. We wandered around town all morning, hanging out in a local coffee shop and the public library. We came home around lunchtime to find everyone awake and Beth still alive.

I am often cranky and out of sorts after a bad night, but all that day I was deliriously, giddily happy because Beth had not been taken from me. I wondered if it would be possible to somehow hold on to that happiness, that pure thankfulness without an intervening crisis. I suspected it would not. The petty annoyances of life have such power to drag us down. Still, I wanted to try. It’s a year later now and I can’t say I’ve never been frustrated, bored or angry. I can’t say I’ve never lost sight of the big picture and forgotten all my blessings. But I often remember that night, and that day, two days after Thanksgiving, and when I do, I try to give thanks.

Noah and I decorated Beth’s cake right after breakfast. He had his heart set on a cake decorated like Buzz, the villain’s robot henchman from Cyberchase (because a Buzz cake is what every forty-something mom secretly years for). I wondered if I was losing a key pre-Christmas opportunity here to work on the concept of giving what the recipient wants instead of what you would want, but he was just so earnest and excited about the idea I caved. To compound matters, I also let him get her a pirate-themed game for her gift after he offered to chip in five dollars of his own money (more than a month’s allowance).

Johnny and Abby took Noah out to lunch and to a science museum in Pittsburgh and they were gone six hours. Andrea’s sister Sue, her stepdaughter in-law Melody and Melody’s eighteen-month-old daughter Lily visited in the morning. After lunch, June and I crashed, taking a long nap. Beth and Andrea braved the Black Friday crowds and went shopping. Andrea bought Beth an iPhone that consumed her attention for the rest of the day and a pointer light to amuse Scarlet the cat. I think Beth’s dad had as much fun making the cat chase the streaking red light as she did chasing it. June and I watched five deer (which June insisted were camels) graze in the backyard. Johnny, Abby and a very sleepy Noah returned from their adventures (he’d slept all the way home) and regaled us with tales of the model trains and the real submarine they’d seen. We had Chinese takeout and cake for dinner and watched an episode of Fraggle Rock, which Johnny remembers fondly. (He was eleven to Beth’s fifteen when it came out and he actually watched it back then, which neither Beth nor I did.) Johnny’s a real Renaissance man, appreciating both seventeenth-century Spanish art and 1980s pop culture. I like that about him.

Just before bed, when we brought the kids downstairs to say goodnight to everyone, Noah and Andrea sang a duet of the first two verses of “Down in the Valley.” (It was late and he had to be dissuaded from singing all five.) When they got to the line “Angels in heaven know I love you,” Andrea enveloped him in a big, grandmotherly hug.

Even with a nap, I was crazy tired all day and not beside myself with joy, but still quietly, deeply, truly thankful, for food, for water and for love.

Notes on Camp

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Guest Blog by Beth

“What should I do?” We usually hear that from Noah a dozen times a day, but I hadn’t heard it all weekend. Until now. At 3 am on Sunday. Could he be talking in his sleep, bored with his dreams? I decided to feign sleep, hoping if he was awake he’d fall back to sleep quickly. It worked.

We were in the middle of our second annual mother-son fall camping trip. Although this is a new tradition, Noah already has two requirements: that we stay in one of the Maryland State Park system’s camper cabins and that we be able to see a waterfall during the trip. This year’s destination: Susquehanna State Park with a side trip to nearby Rocks State Park for waterfall-viewing.

School let out early on Friday, so we hit the road in mid-afternoon, arriving at the park with plenty of time to get settled in then head into town for a pizza dinner. When we returned it had gotten dark, and on the walk to the restrooms for bedtime preparations Noah imagined scary animals lurking in the dark. “I saw an anteater. I definitely saw an anteater.”

Once we were settled into bed, we stayed up late talking through the darkness. Our conversation focused on recurring dreams. Noah’s been having a scary dream lately, which he says he can anticipate because he gets a ticklish feeling on his feet. He had previously been unwilling to divulge the contents of the dream, but after I told him about one of my recurring scary dreams, he spilled the beans on his. It involves him hanging from a tree while a fox leaps at his feet, trying to eat him. “It’s nice when you are in the same room with me so I can tell you everything I think before I fall asleep,” he said.

The next morning it was pancakes cooked over the open fire. “The best pancakes ever,” Noah declared. Perhaps because they were made with Bisquick pancake mix–first ingredient white flour, second ingredient sugar–instead of our usual whole wheat, multi-grain, no sugar recipe from home? Then it was time to drive down to the riverside bike trail for our planned expedition, or so I thought.

“Drive? No, we’re going to ride our bikes from here!”

“But I told you the plan was to drive to the bike trail.”

“No!”

Uh oh. Clearly he had a picture in his head of us biking away from the cabin, and hadn’t been listening when I described the plan.

“But the trail from here isn’t made for bikes. It is narrow and rocky and steep.”

“Bikes are narrow. And our tires are made for rocks. And if you go fast it doesn’t matter if it is steep.”

This was Noah at his most uncompromising, and he was using the all-knowing tone that gets my blood boiling.

“Noah, we just can’t do that. It is not an option.”

“Show me on the map. See, your way is not an option because the trail goes over a creek and bikes can’t just go over creeks.”

“There is a bridge.”

“No there’s not. There’s no bridge symbol on the map.”

“Noah, that part of the trail is along a road and the road goes over a bridge.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

Finally, somehow, as with all such stalemates, I managed to keep my cool, stand my ground, and get him into the car and headed toward the trail.

The bike ride was great, although I mostly walked, pushing my bike with one hand while steadying Noah’s with the other to prevent his training wheels from sticking on the uneven surface. We spent a long time rock hopping in the river, my calls of “be careful” and “use caution” apparently meaningless as he beamed his loose-limbed energy across the sun-dappled water. By the time we finished the trail — 5.4 miles to the Conowingo Dam and back — it was well past lunchtime and I was very hungry. I laid out our lunch options — leftover pizza or a trip to town to find a lunch spot. Noah reflected on the choices then said, “You know what the perfect fall lunch would be? Leaf-shaped cookies and apple cider!” When I suggested that we might want to add something with some nutritional value to the meal — yogurt perhaps? — he gave me a sincerely puzzled look and said “Why?”

So into town we headed, in search of leaf shaped cookies and cider. We found a fair enough approximation at the local grocery store (round “harvest” cookies with orange, yellow, red and brown sprinkles) and I managed to get him on board with the yogurt plan. We ate at a bench overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, on the grounds of the Concord Point lighthouse. The lighthouse was open, so we were able to climb up for a look. Then we headed back to the campground, for an evening of campfire, s’mores, and more anteaters in the shadows. No chatter after lights out this time. The bike ride had worn him out.

Sunday morning we breakfasted at Waffle House (“Let’s pretend that it’s really made of waffles, OK?”) then drove to Rocks State Park for our hike to Kilgore Falls. More scrambling over rocks, more maternal pleas for carefulness and caution. At one point, struggling to make an impression, I stated firmly, “If you take one more step you will fall off that rock to the bottom of the falls and hit your head and die.” He stepped back, but the look on his face let me know that he thought that was just about as likely as running across an anteater in the woods of central Maryland.

Postcards from Rehoboth Beach

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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.

Happy Anniversary, Baby

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Years ago I asked Beth if she could identify the moment she became a woman. It probably had something to do with my dissertation. I wrote it on female coming-of-age stories. For myself I had tentatively chosen the moment my mother and stepfather drove off, leaving me at college. Beth had no doubts. “It was when you first kissed me,” she said sweetly. It was the kind of answer that made me want to go back and revise mine.

That kiss was twenty years and a week ago. Well, twenty years and six days, technically, since it took place after midnight, but we’ve always celebrated it on the fifteenth because that’s when the date started. We had to discuss the kiss in an oblique, roundabout way for hours before we did it. But it did lead to two kids and a mortgage, so perhaps our caution was not misplaced.

Even after our long, tortured conversation, I jumped in blind, since Beth, who had wished on a star for me to fall in love with her, never got around to coming out to me, even after I came out to her and confessed my attraction. The whole thing was perplexing. We’d been friends for two years (she was the very first person I met at college) and our friendship had become more intense since the spring. I asked my friends the Jims, with whom I was living that summer, if they thought she was flirting with me or not. Jim K said yes. Jim B said no. In a way, their answers were not surprising since Jim K was not so secretly in love with Jim B, who did not return his feelings. In the end, the only way to find out was to kiss her and see if she kissed back. She did.

If I was the one brave enough to make the first move, Beth was the one clear-sighted enough to see the relationship for what it was, from the very beginning. When I left for a semester in Spain a month and a half later, she wrote me every day, mailed me Oreos, and bought a double futon, despite the fact that I was coming back to a boyfriend (he spent the summer at home and we’d decided to see other people until I got back from Spain in January) as well as to her and I hadn’t decided exactly what to do about that. Then there was the Spaniard who told me I had “la cara de un ángel” (the face of an angel) and tried to convince me to stay in Córdoba through the spring semester. The turning point was the November morning I found a bouquet of roses on my dorm room desk and I realized with a feeling approaching dread that I didn’t know who they were from. They were from the Spaniard and my instant disappointment that they weren’t from Beth pointed me in the right direction and showed me the way home.

Meanwhile, Beth, who was midway through her senior year in college, was making plans to stay in Oberlin an extra year until I graduated. She got a job at the campus computing center and then she followed me (to Iowa of all places) for grad school. It was shortly after our second move together (to D.C. two years later) that I proposed. We were twenty-four years old, with newly minted Masters degrees in impractical fields. Beth had a part-time job and I was unemployed. We were celebrating the fourth anniversary of our first kiss with a midweek trip to Rehoboth Beach we couldn’t really afford. I presented her with gifts made of paper, cotton, leather, and fruit and flowers (the materials associated with first through fourth anniversaries) and had her open them in backwards order, ending with the card. In the card, I asked her to be my life partner. This time I had no doubt about her answer. She had made it clear for years she was ready for this. Our commitment ceremony was the following January.

Over the years I’ve kept up the tradition of the anniversary materials, with the occasional adjustment. The fifteenth anniversary is crystal and I bought a set of glasses with endearments painted on them since we are not real crystal kind of people. (Noah was a year old that summer and let me tell you, shopping for items made of glass with a toddler in tow is more than a little stressful.) The twentieth anniversary is china. I decided anything ceramic would do and settled on a very pretty set of cobalt and sage green ice cream dishes made by a West Virginian potter.

I didn’t get to give them to Beth on our actual anniversary, however, because she was on a three and a half day business trip to Toronto. We decided to celebrate on her return rather than before she left because I was pretty cranky about her leaving and I thought it would be a happier occasion if we waited.

I was sad while she was gone, but we muddled through. The kids got fed and bathed. Dishes and laundry got done. I was even ambitious enough to take the kids to Air and Space and to mow the lawn. (One of the advantages of using a push-mower is that you can safely mow with a toddler playing in the yard.) I took a vacation from cooking anything more complicated than mac and cheese from a box and pancakes, much to Noah’s delight. June’s naps were disrupted because I was taking Noah to and from camp instead of just picking him up and she kept falling asleep in the stroller. The hardest part turned out to be getting her settled at night. She’s used to falling asleep in Beth’s arms after I nurse her. I use this time to shower and do small chores around the house. After two nights of skipping the cat box, I finally had to clean it with June standing right there, wanting to sample their food and play in that fun sand box where Mommy was playing.

Late Tuesday night, Beth returned, bringing tales of exotic restaurants and the theater. She went to a play! I figured out that at the exact time the curtain rose, I must have been trying to stop June from engaging in texture play in the litter box. I am trying very hard not to begrudge Beth this experience.

Wednesday morning, we opened presents. We’d waited so Noah could watch. He’d been quite taken with the idea that he was “the only one in the whole world” who knew both my “versary” gift to her and hers to me. He kept the secrets faithfully, only letting slip that he thought Beth’s gift to me was better. “But they’re both good,” he added diplomatically. This piqued my curiosity since Beth had hinted she would make up for her absence on the actual day of our anniversary through the gift. Inside a store bought card with a picture of a falling star on it was a card she and Noah made on the computer. It had a photo of the house where I lived during the summer of 1987 on the front and the Rehoboth boardwalk on the inside. “We’re leaving Friday afternoon for Rehoboth Beach,” it said. It also said, “I can’t think of a better way to spend half my life.” Neither can I.

We went to our favorite Mexican restaurant that night to celebrate twenty years with spinach enchiladas and virgin mango daiquiris. At home we ate coffee and vanilla ice cream out of the new ice cream dishes.

The weekend at the beach raced by, as beach weekends do. This was our first summertime trip to the beach since June was a little baby and the first time she was able to really enjoy it. She fell head over heels in love with the sand, the surf, the whole experience. Noah and I spent hours making sand castles and pretending Jack and Annie from the Magic Tree House series (www.randomhouse.com/kids/magictreehouse/) were having adventures in them. This morning as we were headed to breakfast, we passed the guesthouse where I proposed to Beth. She was telling Noah for the umpteenth time to stay on the sidewalk and off the chemically treated lawns. I was a bit ahead, pushing June in the stroller and retrieving her sneakers as she repeatedly removed them and pitched them out onto the sidewalk. I stopped in front of the guesthouse and waited for Beth to catch up. I put my arms around her neck and kissed her. “Will you marry me?” I said.

She smiled and said yes, again.