Beach week

I apologize yet again for disappearing for a while there.  There has been a lot going on–a week which included three TTC-related procedures (more on that later), a week at the beach with Roo’s family, and general summer craziness.

For the last five or so years, Roo’s parents have rented a house and our family, plus Roo’s brother and his family, have stayed with them for a week.  I won’t go into the details here, but things were not so good in Roo’s family when she was growing up.  So it is an amazing sign of the work all four of them have done that this trip was ever possible.  And it is miraculous that we have done it for the last 5 years.  Roo and her brother have very different political and religious beliefs. But his family and ours have remarkably similar parenting styles, which ends up mattering a lot more when we are all spending time together. The college-age revolutionary that I was would probably not believe that this was possible, but it seems to be the case for us.

It was a hard week for Roo and me in certain ways.  We left for the beach the day after the third of the three procedures in one week, and there was a lot we were still sorting out about that.  And then Roo’s brother happened to mention that his preferred presidential candidate was Rick Santorum, which was difficult to figure out what to do with.  But we did a lot of swimming and playing in the sand.  And the advantage of having so many adults is that Roo and I got to go out on several dates after Tad was in bed.

Tadpole loves spending so much time with his relatives.  He loved having his uncle and his grandfather around (the obsession with men that I talked about here is alive and well).  He also has three cousins who were there (two girls, ages 6 1/2 and 5, and a boy age 2) and they got into all sorts of mischief together.  He and his next-oldest cousin spent lots of time playing imaginary games and building sand castles together.  Sometimes they would both have imaginary houses (in opposite corners of the front porch, for example) and “visit” each others’ houses.  And sometimes she would have a house and he would be the firefighter who came to put out fires in the house (you might be able to guess which kid picked out which plot…).

And then there were the moments when he was clearly experimenting with the power of being bigger than another kid.  One night the grown-ups were sitting over the remains of dinner.  We heard a scream from the room next door, where the kids where playing.  Then Tadpole came running into the room, giggling.  His younger cousin’s brand new fire truck was tucked under his arm, and the cousin was in hot pursuit.  Tad ducked and weaved around the adults like an NFL player, and went laughing into the kitchen, leaving his cousin in tears.  Sigh.

For Roo and me, it is also wonderful to connect with our nieces and nephew.  I went out into the ocean with my older niece for a long time one day, and we had so much fun.  She clung to me like a little monkey, and we talked about her upcoming school year and giggled when big waves came.  My nephew is working hard on learning to speak and on understanding the world, and he spent an evening dragging me around the house and pointing out things that are “dawt” (dark, i.e. the fireplace and the inside of his mouth).  And I had lots of little moments with my younger niece, including a long walk with her and Tad and my mother-in-law.

So that’s a brief update.  Thanks for checking back despite the dearth of recent posts (and isn’t “dearth” a great word?).