Vacation Round-up

Dear Readers,

Thank you for weighing in on whether or not I should read the bathroom copies of Us Weekly, etc., on my beach vacation. For the record, I did NOT. Considering, however, that we got evacuated Thursday morning because of Hurricane Irene, there's really no telling if I would have held-out had we stayed at the beach an entire week.

Highlights of the trip:

Hanging out playing cards and drinking wine with dear friends.

Reading Oliver Twist aloud in the car.

Watching back to back episodes of Friday Night Lights thanks to Tom and Netflix.

Private pool.

Perfect Weather, impending hurricane notwithstanding.

Date night with Tom. Out by 5:30, back by 6:30. Are we sizzling or what?



Yes, I'm wearing a shirt.
Speaking of back by 6:30, when I saw the pics Molly took of us before we left, I realized I was having An Inch of Gray Emergency. Nothing like capping off a hot date with some Root Touch Up on the deck. What a guy!


North Carolina Aquarium. We even saw box turtles mating.

Evacuation Trip to Great Wolf Lodge.
My face looked a lot like the kids' did when I realized that after almost a week of earnest-- okay obsessive-- lice prevention at the beach house (plastic bags, sequestered pillows, lots of laundry), I would have to rest my weary head at a KIDDIE RESORT. Oy vey.

Fine dining.

Yes, that's leftover beach house fridge salad, saved in a cooler for dinner at Great Wolf Lodge. Tom wanted to pizza delivery; I wanted the buffet. He thought the buffet was too expensive. Soooo, we ordered the kids the buffet and we adults sat there with ice water, scowling at each other.

Instead of breaking down and ordering, which I really should have done, I stuffed my face on bag salad, cheese, and Oreos back in the room, before falling asleep in bed-- with Molly. Nothing like keeping the aggressive in passive/aggressive.

Tom and the kids had fun on the awesome slides...

but none of us feels compelled to go again. It just wasn't really our vibe. If we're not even going to spring for meals there, you can bet the resort didn't get buy-in from us for: building our own wolves, having a robot serve us ice cream, getting kiddie pedicures, filling plastic cups with candy ($8!), and sporting temporary tattoos.

Let's remember that when Tom took Jake to Legoland in California, he bought him a $3 Lego mini-figure as a souvenir, and when I took Molly to the American Girl Doll Store in NYC, I got out of there having spent just $19. I would tell you that our entire honeymoon cruise bar tab amounted to $2.50, but that's simply too depressing.

Simply put, it was time to come home.

So now we're home, the laundry is in the machine, and we're awaiting a hurricane that may or may not batter the East Coast.

And you? What are YOU doing as summer winds down?

Beach DO or Beach DON'T?

As I mosey down the boulevard of broken boogie boards, also known as a family beach vacation, I desperately seek the advice of my wise friends.

The dilemma:

If your rented beach house had a basket chock full of tempting and trashy magazines such as Us Weekly, Star, Cosmo, and People, would you read them?

Yes, you say?

Well, what if this basket was in the main BATHROOM of said beach rental?

Would the gross-out factor of reading a magazine that has been read by many strangers, in the most intimate of settings, override the siren song of learning about what Nick and Vanessa are doing, whether Lindsay is in jail or not, or who will star in the movie adaptation of "The Hunger Games"?

For now, I'm going with the gross-out factor. No promises as the week progresses. What do YOU think?

Rock Me Like A Hurricane

Not sure about that title, because I think it's "Rock You Like a Hurricane," and for all I know it could be something totally different, like "Sock it to the Weather vane." I have zero luck with song lyrics, having always thought "Love in an Elevator" was "Lovin' it in Latifah"-- whatever that might mean. My kids are fortunate I'll have not a clue whether lyrics are trashy or not. Have heard a tad about what "Poker Face" means, but that's fodder for yet another post...

Anyway, our beach vacation ended abruptly because of the impending hurricane. We had 3 1/2 days before we were evacuated. Thought I'd share vacation tidbits:

Found several reasons to reconsider an end of August beach rental. While hurricane season is one, the grunge factor of a beach house that's been rented all summer long weighed in as well. Not that there's anything wrong with flicking crusty boogs off of the pillows, and wondering what had happened on and under and around the covers all summer long... but it gave me the heebie jeebies-- big time.

Got a great picture of the kids frolicking directly on the bare mattress of a rental bed. Nice. Haven't seen any signs of lice or bedbugs yet. It took me about 3.25 days to get desensitized to the ick factor and just start enjoying, at which time a knock at the door informed us to start packing and hit the road.

I realize beach vacations are not the time to diet, but it makes it hard not to think about it when one's beach clothes don't fit. I dug up my "Mother's Journal" in which I was trying to journal once a year(!) about my kids, hoping I'd catch up while on vacation. First bummer: the most recent entry was 2006. Second bummer: I found a chart inside that showed the last time I was at my current weight, I was 19 weeks pregnant. Yay! Pass the mojitos and chips.

I have some cute beach pics of the kids to share but they'll have to wait until the camera battery charges. At around 10 pm (hour 6 of our drive home) the kids started making crazy home movies in the back seat. This was preferable to the fighting of the first 2 hours, so I let them drain the battery.

In all, the trip was excellent, albeit much too short. Beautiful weather (not a cloud in the sky!), great friends, late night card games, and plentiful hush puppies made for a terrific time.

Each trip must have a catch-phrase or defining image, and I'll leave you with ours, which surprisingly, is NOT Hurricane Earl related.

During a rousing game of Apples to Apples, in which Molly got both the words "smudge" and "hairy," she started parading around the house singing, "My smudge is hairy, my smudge is hairy!" No clue what that means, but it was hi-larious and rather catchy. Seriously. By the next day, we were all singing it.

Maybe it was time to come home.