Today is Fifth Grader's birthday. She is eleven years old. I'm a little weepy.
We have just returned home from honoring the tradition of the birthday dinner - the birthday girl chose Olive Garden for her fete - with one too many breadsticks before dinner and a spectacular gob of chocolate-filled chocolate cake afterward. Hello, food coma. However, as I fell asleep while writing my last post before having a chance to finish my vacation tale, I thought I better take a few minutes to do so. Then I will return to my coma.
So where did I leave off? Oh right, the arrival. So the trip from LAX to Miss S.'s house involved driving through a canyon, an experience that Third Grader came to call going "over the hill." She didn't like going "over the hill" for some reason, and every journey out of the house sparked the question "Do we have to go over the hill to get there?" No idea what the issue was with that "hill". Well...it might have been the poor man in distress that we encountered during our virgin canyon crossing, the one whose car conked out on him at the very top and who wildly flagged us down (a car full of women and children, please note) to ask if he could borrow our cell phone. We did not oblige, following the natural Mama Bear instinct to Protect the Children, and the girls puzzled over the man's possible fate for the rest of our stay.
It was a short trip overall - only three days - but Miss S. did a wonderful job of filling it with activity. Long Beach Aquarium on Saturday, where Fifth Grader, in particular, really dug petting the sharks and sting rays; local farmers' market on Sunday, where we sampled delectable fruit and spotted celebrities (hello, Willie Garson from SATC). Pottery painting Sunday afternoon, a charming canyon hike and then Hollywood Boulevard on Monday. Just enough sightseeing to wow the Tornadoes and busyness to wear out the toddler, intertwined with rest periods at the house so the girls could "play backyard" with little E. and I could impersonate a slug on the couch. Oh, the slugness of vacation without an itinerary: it is a beautiful thing. Beautiful for the slug, at least. Not so helpful to the hostess - but hey, I did bring two babysitters-in-training with me, right? And it was really lovely to see this other, caregiving side of the girls. (Lovely to watch them, poignant to realize this means they aren't babies anymore themselves).
I wish I had planned things to be able to stay longer than three days, if only so we could have made it to the beach once. I almost left wishing that Miss S. and I could have worked in a chance to go out one night sans kids. Every night we determined to go out, and almost every night we were both too wiped out by sunset to follow through. We did, thankfully, manage to sneak out for dinner and girl talk on my last night there - an evening that I hope to cover further in this weekend's column. All in all, it was a perfect reprieve from life-as-usual.
Having said that, life-as-usual has been particularly rough going this week since we got back. I sort of knew that was going to happen. But life is life, isn't it, and sometimes you just have to deal. I'm sure it won't be long until I am itching to get out of town again for a few days (it never takes long).
Meanwhile, little girls, we'll always have L.A.
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2 comments:
It was beyond perfect to have you here, even if I did subject your children to the horror of the man on the hill. Are they still asking about him?
Tell them I bumped into him at the Coffee Bean and he told me his car is fine and he totally understands why I said I didn't have a cellphone with me (even though he could see it sitting in my cup holder). They'll buy that, right?
There's also Fla.w/Uncle Mike & Aunt Sheryl.......We would love to have ya'll come stay for a few days,Anytime....
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