Archive for the ‘Unpleasantness’ Category
J and I sort of planned our holiday time off badly. For some reason he thought I was taking the whole week of Christmas off whereas I thought he was taking the week after Christmas off – either way our lack of communication was evident since our vacations weren’t exactly scheduled for the same times and he ended up having to work most of the New Year weekend leaving Ava and I to make the road trip to my parents’ place by ourselves.
Despite my best intentions of leaving early…it didn’t happen. (This is totally normal for me, by the way. I can’t imagine anyone actually believes me anymore when I say we’ll be there on time, much less early.)
Ava’s packing assistance left a lot to be desired.
I asked her to put her blankets and toys that she wanted to take in the bag. Not so much help, as you can see.
We did finally get on the road and made it just in time for the snow and ice to start. Since I loathe anything remotely winter, I was uber stressed about the weather and the possibility of getting snowed in. All this was on top of not being able to spend the New Year with J and Ava being quite confused as to why her daddy wasn’t around.
There were quite a few visitors over that night so Ava was a little more wound up than usual. She also didn’t eat much of her dinner (too many people around), started giving me attitude (still too many people around, some of whom thought obnoxious things she was doing was cute – they weren’t), didn’t get a bath, and got to bed a little later than normal. Since Ava is a creature of habit and routine all of these things were Not Good.
Also not good was the fact that I didn’t set up her pack and play but instead put her onto her Aero toddler mattress. We’d done a very successful trial run with this during a hotel stay earlier in the month so J convinced me to try it. So I did.
Let’s just say it was a big fat FAIL.
I got her to sleep relatively easily. She was so tired that she fell asleep in my arms and only stirred a teeny bit when I laid her down on the mattress. I surrounded her with her blankets, books, and stuffed animals and headed back out to watch a little TV with my folks. There was nary a peep from the baby monitor all evening so I figured we were golden.
Yeah. Until I walked in the room a couple of hours later and couldn’t find my baby.
I tiptoed in, shut off the music playing for her, and quietly got ready to climb into my own bed. As is my habit, I walked over to peek at her and found…nothing. Her bed was empty.
At first I thought she’d simply rolled out of bed so I turned my phone on to use the light before realizing she wasn’t there. I thought maybe she’d climbed into my bed – not there, either. Nor was she beside the bed or anywhere else easily visible.
I flipped out, of course. I was terrified. Seriously, my heart stopped beating for a moment. I looked everywhere.
And then I found her:
She’d scooted the rocking chair over to the head of the air mattress, climbed under it, tucked a blanket under her head to use as a pillow, and was sleeping on the very cold, hardwood floor.
And yes, I did stop to take a picture of this before scooping her up because this was my proof to show J that we did actually try the air mattress (with near disastrous results). Picture quality is poor because it’s my phone camera and it was dark-ish in the room.
Needless to say, I scared the heck out of her (but not nearly as much as she scared me) when I woke her. I then promptly deflated the air mattress and then dragged out and set up the pack and play conveniently stored there. Fortunately she was back to sleep in a matter of minutes, safely caged and secured for the remainder of the night (and for our entire visit).
I didn’t sleep much that night. That kind of fear, just that short moment of not knowing where she was, kept me up and checking on her all night long. I’m really not going to handle the teenage years well, I don’t think.
Here we go again.
As the water continued to rise, my hurricane/flooding PTSD was (somewhat) kept in check with a tea party hosted by Miss Ava and attended by Winnie the Pooh himself. Well, that and the knowledge that our house had been raised substantially since the last major flooding incident.
And the water kept rising.
Fortunately the cars had been moved to higher ground and we had enough forewarning to move as much stuff as we possibly could. The riding lawnmower, thanks to a winch and a whole lot of nagging on my part and muscle on J’s, was resting comfortably on the second level of our side deck along with anything else that would fit.
The evening high tide was the worst, peaking just below the levels of Hurricane Isabel. If we hadn’t raised our house we may have had some water inside – iffy but way too close for my comfort. As it was, our sheds flooded and the garage took about 4 inches of water, helped along by Miss Ava opening the garage door using Daddy’s remote he left on the hall table. Our neighbors were not so lucky and they did indeed end up with several inches inside their house – this doesn’t seem like a lot until you see how much damage a relatively small amount of water can do.
Although I love our little town and our neighborhood sometimes living this close to the coast ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
We went to (shocker!) the local mega-lo-waterpark again. What can I say? It’s really, really hot here which makes the water park sound pretty appealing most days. The season pass is convenient, it’s only a short drive away, and Ava adores it. While we have many, many beaches nearby and do visit them a lot sometimes I just get tired of sand EVERYWHERE.
The difference with our trip this time is that we all went with a friend.
I had my friend, J had his friend/coworker/my friend’s husband (we set them up way back when and I was the matron of honor at their wedding), their oldest daughter took her friend, and Ava had her pal, Izzy (our goddaughter). Confusing, eh? Sounds almost inbred, really.
Regardless – we had a great time for most of the day. I got to talk/gossip/complain for hours, J got to ride all the rides he never gets to with me and Ava, there were many hands and eyes watching the little ones, and I got a clear picture of what 14 year old girls act like when they are forced to hang out with their parents in public. Oh yeah, and a preview of exactly how many teen boys will follow you around to get glimpses of those barely teenage girls.
It was packed, however. That wasn’t pleasant. Our usually sparsely populated kid area out in the Back 40 was overrun with people – not all of which were there with kids (which just bugged me).
Why did it bug me?
Maybe you can tell me why someone would think it was appropriate to untie your bikini top while laying in the shallows of the kid pool.
That’s Izzy’s tush, by the way.
I was about 15 seconds from going over and asking her to put her top on when she realized we were all glaring at her so she quickly tied things back up and moved on.
Sheesh, come on. Head over to the big people pool to do this. Especially because it could really be dangerous in this part of the park. There are lots of little, little ones there and I’m some of them would likely view her as a potential food source.
Anyhow, Ava and Izzy didn’t notice because they were too busy swimming…
and having a snack…
and catching some rays.
I did catch some attitude from both of them, too. They were apparently paying way too much attention to the teenagers in our midst.
A bit sassy…
and a lot of hands on hips action here.
After we left the kiddie area we headed over to the big pool for a little while before heading home. It was here that I was blindsided with my first really uncomfortable race/adoption incident. Mostly race, actually.
We were sitting in the shallow end with the little ones trying to get them acclimated to the wave pool when two young African-American girls (like maybe 7 and 6-ish years old) came up behind Ava and started following her saying “Ni-Hao, Ni-Hao.” They then turned to me and asked if Ava was my daughter. I brought her in closer to me and said that yes, she was. They then asked if she were Chinese (Duh!) and I again answered in the affirmative. This puzzled them, of course and we had a back and forth dialogue about how she could be Chinese and still speak English. I was trying to be patient and educate them when the older one looks at me and told me that she knew how to speak Chinese (for the first time ever I was cursing the show, Ni-Hao, Kai-Lan) and she started walking toward Ava again saying “Ni-Hao” and “Ching-Chong, Ching-Chong.” It was at this point that I’d had it and lectured them (age appropriately, I think) for a couple of minutes on polite behavior and then told them to leave now and go back to their mother. They high tailed it out of there posthaste at that point.
Ava is clueless as to what’s going on (thank goodness) and I was left with a sick, sad feeling that this is only the first of many times that Ava is going to experience this. My heart broke a little and I became a whole lot more cognizant of what ignorance my baby is going to deal with. I wish I could protect her from this. I hate that I can’t.
I still don’t know if I handled this properly and I’m still dwelling on it and trying to figure out if I did the right thing and/or what should I have done or said differently. I know that these were just kids and they weren’t trying to intentionally hurt Ava (or me) but it doesn’t excuse it nor does it excuse the lack of freakin’ parental responsibility of leaving small children unsupervised and talking to strangers in a crowded water park while in/near a 9 foot deep wave pool without life jackets, no less. Grrr!