spring break 2012

Apologies for the lack of updates, but it’s been a pretty busy few weeks at work leading up to Spring Break—my penultimate entry, the one about organ donation, I actually wrote in my cubicle while on call on a Sunday, killing time between OR cases. But enough of this work talk. I WANT TO LIVE AGAIN.

So…Spring Break!

We’re spending the first half of the week at a rented house on Hilton Head Island, which sharp minds will remember as the exact same place we spend Spring Break last year. But that’s the kind of people we are—it’s the same with restaurants, actually, because once I find something on the menu that I love, it’s very difficult for me not to order the same thing every time. Occasionally I think, “Self, it’s a big menu, maybe I should try something else, and I will like that other thing equally or even more!” But then I think, what if I don’t like it as much, and then I will have wasted one of my eating-outings with a meal that I know I could have enjoyed better? And the worry about that haunts me, for real, because clearly I have psychological problems. So with that, and with things in general, our motto is to stick with what works. Confession: we’ll probably be back here again next year. But maybe, if we’re feeling daring, we’ll rent the house next door. Maybe. ADVENTURE.

Anyway, here are some pictures. You may have seen some of these if you follow my Twitter or Tumblr mini blog (the mini blog is where I post a lot of my pictures on the go—-I know everyone loves them some Instagram but I like to make my own space for archival purposes). And if you’re not following me in those places, well, why the hell not?

The thing I really like about this area is that for a lot of the day, it seems like we're the only ones at the beach. It's actually a pretty busy time at Hilton Head--aside from it being Spring Break, there's also some kind of crazy golf tournament going on--but our rental house is at the end of this little appendage of land in this cove, so we're off the main beach somewhat and it feels very isolated. Which is great, because of my fear and loathing of other humans.  (Mostly fear.)

Like last year, we're here with Joe's parents, which has been really nice for the kids. It also means that they end up with twice as many beach toys as they had originally. Here they are flying their new kites. Mack highly approved of his new Angry Birds kite. (Yes, Mack is wearing 3D glasses as sunglasses for some reason, like some kid in Atomic Age America.)

Mack has this stuffed animal that he likes--a blue Baby Gund soft puppy that I think someone gifted us before Cal was born, in which Mack has started taking some moderate interest these past few months. He calls it, quite imaginatively, "Soft Puppy." I mean, he's not inseparable from it or anything, but he likes it quite a bit.  I asked him, several times, if he wanted me to pack Soft Puppy in our luggage to take to the beach house.

"No, because I don't want him to get sandy," he told me.  Sounded reasonable.  My fault for not just packing the damn dog anyway.

Our first night in, after being on the road for eight hours, Mack asked me if we could go home.  "Can we go home, get Soft Puppy, and then come right back to the beach house?"

Uh...

I explained to him that it wouldn't quite be possible to drive home just to get Soft Puppy, but that he would be safe at home and that we'd see him in a few days. Partially I blame road fatigue, but he just completely decompensated. I'm not going to say anything else about it except at one point I quite calmly told him he should probably stop screaming or one of our neighbors might call the police. Finally we managed to calm him down (luckily I had brought along a collection of his familiar books from home, as well as a cache of prickly plastic dinosaurs that he indeed decided to sleep with instead), but the next day we headed to the nearest local general store and Mack chose this new stopgap measure stuffed animal, which he has named "Sister Bear."

So now he's walking around with a pink bear and that makeup brush to his left.  He likes the feeling of the hair on his fingers, kinda like Lenny from "Of Mice and Men" with the dead mice in his pocket; I got him the makeup brush purely as an act of self-preservation because it was either the brush or having him hang onto my hair like a baby orangutan. My sensitive young man.

Speaking of sensitive young men, here is the other one, asking us sullenly if he could please go into the house and play chess already. On Spring Break. At the beach.

(To be fair, he also was requesting to play "Kung Fu Rabbit" on my iPad in addition to chess.) We quite cruelly forced him to continue playing outside to fortify his anemic humors and rachitic bones, but we're on a vacation with grandparents, so everyone's being a little indulged.

Anyway, we'll be here until Wednesday, and head back to Atlanta on Thursday. Hope you're all doing well and enjoying each other as much as we are. Meanwhile, I will continue to wear a series of increasingly inadvisable tank tops with horizontal stripes.