Blurgh. We forgot to charge the camera, so there are no pictures. Which means that in 6 weeks I won't remember it at all if I don't write something about it. So this is going to be long, and mostly uninteresting.
We had a good time- the inaugural road trip with TBB (the beige beauty) was without incident, until we got through Houston and hit sheets and sheets of heavy rain. You don't realize how incredibly loud it is until it stops. We had to wait under an overpass for a while with a few other drivers who had the same idea. The girls slept for the last half of the trip, but woke up to being carried inside in the rain, serenaded by dogs.
My dad has a deep mysterious aversion to turning on the air conditioner, ever. I have been there in August, when every other sentence is it's-not-the-heat-it's-the-humidity, and he has still forbade anyone from turning on the central air. I'm sure it's partly bills, but it might have something to do with manning up, embracing noble suffering, disdaining emergency room trips for anything less than the lower body turkey grease burning of Thanksgiving 89, or the truck-picking-up-Achilles-tendon-pull of the mid 90s.
Anyway, I actually really enjoy it, if it's not too hot. We had a fan in the window, which helped Jane sleep, and there's something really comforting and nice about sleeping in that room and hearing all the same sounds of the neighborhood.
Other highlights of the weekend- bbq ribs by my mom, followed by orange custard pie. blueberry pancakes and bacon at my dad's house, picking blackberries on my dad's fence and watching the girls pop them straight into their mouths. I picked blackberries from that same fence when I was a kid, although I had to ride my bike around to the other side and climb in the ditch. Lazy kids these days. I was a little hesitant about teaching Jane that she can eat things she finds outside, but on reflection, I realized she does this already, which is why I have the poison control number saved on my phone. So for once she should eat something she finds that tastes GOOD. She seemed to eat more red berries than black (verified by diaper change about 3 hours later) but the red berries did not discourage her at all. Strange child.
We also made a trip to heartbreaking Crystal Beach, with the old road totally washed out and the beach just covered in debris, so long after Ike. The dunes are just gone, it's incredible. Wren had fun digging in the sand, and Jane had fun terrifying us by breaking from our hands and running as far into the surf as she could. There was one enormous and eerie piece of industrial equipment, it looked like a concrete cistern top, sitting just under breaking waves a few feet out. The undertow had dug a deep trench around it, and so Jane was 5 inches deep one step and then blinking up at me from under roiling water the next. I scooped her up and she screamed "TOWL TOWL TOWL TOWL" until I got her wrapped up in a towel. Then of course she wanted to drag her towel back into the water.
In spite of breaking both of the ties on the seine, my dad and I still pulled in a bunch of flopping minnows and a shrimp to show the girls. I thought they were pretty "meh" about it, for all the pants-soaking effort I'd put in. Oh well.
It occurs to me that "pants-soaking effort" could be taking in a lot of very different ways. I just mean that I waded into the water and I was wearing shorts. There.
Jane and Wren had their reunion with Alvin/Pete at their Granny Alley's house, and I think everyone there got peed on by the puppy at some point. Ah, dachshunds.
Also, poor Pearl, my dad's lovely puppy, got swiped by a car while getting the paper on Sunday morning. I heard it from the back yard and ran around the house to see her crying and limping under the porch. She emerged an hour later to be fed Advil wrapped in cheese, and spend the rest of the day being gently pet under my dad's chair. She's recovering, and is, in my dad's words, a little more street smart now.
And on the way home we stopped in Houston and I FINALLY got to cuddle baby Rush, who is handsome and wonderful and gorgeous, and very very lucky to have been born into the family he has. Also, Ramona devoured a ball the neighborhood kids foolishly lost in the William's back yard.
So that was the trip. I could have skipped most of the words if I'd remembered the camera. Oh well.
2 comments:
this is wonderful. i like your words. a lot.
your family, and beaumont in general, remind me of why i want so much to have a homestead. i like that your girls eat the same blackberries and hear the same sounds. that's precious to me.
we have lived in this house for two years. that's the longest i've ever lived in any house, ever, in my entire life.
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