guess who...

...finished 26th in his half marathon this past weekend?

This guy.

LD ran the half with his high school buddy, both of whom ran much faster than projected. Munch was more interested in gatorade and M&M-spiked trail mix than she was in cheering for the finishers, although she did manage a big congratulatory tackle for her daddy.

And the two of them passed the afternoon playing one of Munch's favorite games - MAMA AND BABY NAPTIME

Truthfully, it is not a very pleasant game for you - the baby - as you have to lie on your stomach while she "pats" your back and tells you TAKE A NAP BABY (thump thump thump). After 13.1 miles in unseasonably hot weather and a victory beer with brunch, LD found himself in no position to protest.

I returned from my own run to find LD not having moved too far. Munch had changed into one of her nicest dresses and was watching WALL-E on the couch, both uncommon as part of our normal Sunday afternoon routine.

Congrats baby - your mamas are proud of you.

things that grow, part 2

Perhaps in response to my last post, LD's garden offered up the first of the season's vegetables. We scrubbed and chopped the early greens and gave thanks that dinner would not be the typical end-of-a-busy-week choice between quesadillas or pasta in jarred marinara. Sweet peas and cauliflower are coming soon.

Unfortunately for Wow, his most recent pediatrician stats are being compared to LD's garden, and the little guy is coming up short. Literally. He's back in the 40th percentile for height and LD wants to know if I've been taking my prenatal vitamins. Good grief. I think the fact he's in the 60th percentile for weight speaks highly of the mama milk factory, a factory that's been operating in double-time.

Other things-that-grow updates include the four loads of clean laundry that, by Friday morning, were blocking entry into both the bathroom and Munch's room. Someone around here has entered the extra fun "blow out poop" stage of development, meaning I put on a load of laundry almost every day. And although I am happy to report that by the end of the week this family hit a comfortable stride in our new routine, it was still a routine that did not allow for much pilfering through the laundry, much less putting it away.

So on Friday morning I dropped my daughter off at school wearing this-

A ruffled shirt, running shorts, frilly socks, and running shoes. Do you notice something missing?

That's right.
No detangler.

faking it

First week back at work and Its. Been. Chaos.

Absolute where's-my-pager-what's-floating-in-the-sink-who-drew-with-crayon-on-the-inside-of-the-froggy-potty chaos.

Last night, for what I think was the first time in our adult lives, LD and I collapsed in bed - me in the office with the pager for a night of call - without having done a single dish. Between answering pages, I somehow lost my mouth guard in the bed. Gross, I know, but I was too tired to care.

When I woke up had to unearth the kitchen sink to get water for my coffee. In my bleary-eyed, pre-caffeinated state, I overlooked the plumes of detangler I was spraying over the breakfast table while trying to wrestle Munch's hair into a ponytail. With an annoyed grumbled, LD moved the bowls out of my line of fire. Munch, also not impressed by this frenzied fit of mommy-multitasking, vocalized her annoyance, which was directed more at having her hair yanked around while trying to eat oatmeal. Later I heard Wow's fussiness interrupted by a sharp gasping sound, meaning that Munch had just shoved the pacifier down his throat.

I am not one for whom "rise and shine" has ever come easily (a trait I passed onto my daughter) and LD has been woken up a few times by my shouting expletives at the ringing alarm clock. This is usually because I've been awake for the last few hours by a certain young man who finds himself bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to play at four in the morning. Mom comes in two weeks (Wow is being cared for by a friend's aunt) and I simply cannot wait.

Work has been work. The next six weeks will be tough, after which my schedule lightens up.

I started back on the bone marrow transplant service. Although the hours are long and the patients are sick, the nursing and support staff are wonderful, which does a lot to ease the transition. I find the question "How will you pass the day?" appreciated by patients as a welcome diversion from our typical conversations regarding mouth sores, fevers, diarrhea, and rashes. We chat briefly about books, movies, or other quiet hobbies that fill those weeks - or months - of a transplant hospitalization.

I notice these conversations lighten my heart as well, so I try to make an effort. In the small alcove outside each patient's room, I put on my gown, wash my hands, and pull a smile. A smile that does not always come naturally. June 1. I can make it till June 1. Smile. 

Faking it. Fake it till I make it.

adventures with the in-laws

As I held Wow’s head against the back of his car seat to avoid it jerking forward every time my FIL hit what seemed like an unending series of deep holes on this unpaved, unmarked, interminable “road” to only-god-knows-where, I was reminded again of how different family vacations are with my in-laws. We had to roll the windows up to avoid being hit in the face with twigs from the overgrown foliage that lined the path that purportedly led to the island’s most pristine beach.

Growing up, my family spent 99% of vacations at the Oregon coast, central Oregon, visiting my dad’s extended family in Rhode Island, or visiting my mom’s family wherever they happened to be living.  Everyone was responsible for his or her own reading material and there was usually an athletic activity available. If it was just the four us, the day would typically feature both an early afternoon and post dinner trip to the candy store, taffy shop, or ice cream parlor.

In contrast, LD’s family once road tripped in a Geo Metro from their home in northern New Mexico to Playa de Carmen on the Yucatan Peninsula. It might also be mentioned that my FIL, at 5’10, is the shortest of the four-member family. And that the Geo didn’t have air conditioning. They took only local roads (i.e. no toll roads), ate in local eateries, and avoided the typical "tourist traps" along the way.

They are, simply put, a family who craves adventure. And although I am fortunate to have been included in some of their travels, I was a bit worried about the current situation – specifically that we were going to get a flat tire and become stranded with no decent map or phone service in a rural area of an already sparsely populated island.  When I asked FIL if he thought there was a spare tire in the somewhat beat up rental car, he replied “probably”. This is interesting because it is the exact same answer he gave when I asked, on Easter Sunday night while driving on the reserve tank and unable to find an open gas station, if he thought we could make it home. And we did.

But with both my babies in the car, it wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. I mentally calculated how many glasses of wine I would need to unwind should we eventually make it back.

The beach was beautiful and there was great snorkeling to be had in the reef just offshore.  MIL and Munch built a princess castle decorated with pink seashells. While snorkeling, I had the absolute bejesus scared out of me by a huge lobster that seemed to appear from nowhere. LD caught (and later released) a blue-eyed hermit crab he wanted to show Munch. 

And we made it home in one piece (as did the rental car).

A many thanks, MIL and FIL, for all the memories, especially those that required a little wine.

snorkeling

I love snorkeling. It's quiet, peaceful, and doesn't require much gear. In fact, those qualities are common to most of my favorite activities - reading, writing, yoga, running. Peaceful. No gear. The exception is skiing, which I love despite the gear.

The problem is snorkeling with LD.

We'd just spent over an hour snorkeling together. I plopped down on the white sand, happy and exhausted. He sat down next to me. Had I seen the five sea turtles? The sting rays? The eel? Wasn't the (insert name of magnificent sea creature here) amazing? 

I had to collect my thoughts. Had we been circling the same reef?

No, I said, a bit defensively. I had seen purple fan coral and some knobby black coral with white spots. I had seen silver fish and some fat yellow ones. And it was beautiful.

In my defense, I don't go around poking my nose or fingers into spaces from which small fangs could emerge.

See that turtle? So did I! My MIL spotted him just offshore and LD snapped the pic.

This little guy is totally unrelated to the post. But I thought he was cute. 

easter on harbour island

I doubted we could do much in the way of Easter celebrations this year. I mentioned to LD that I might just pack a bag of chocolate eggs in my suitcase and keep things easy on the Easter bunny.

Oh no, he said. We would have a kitchen, it wouldn’t be that difficult to boil eggs. And he was right in that regard- although 100% wrong that we would be able to find any egg-dying accoutrement on this "out island"of the Bahamian archipelago.

Luckily, but not surprisingly, MIL came prepared.

After the egg hunt we piled into the car and headed northward. We passed over the Glass Window Bridge – a poetic name for the unattractive concrete structure under which the churning Atlantic runs into the calm Caribbean sea. 

Despite many many attempts, I couldn’t get the blue ocean-

and green sea-

 into a single frame. Here is a much better picture.

We continued northward to Whale Point - the jumping off port for Dunmore Town in Harbour Island. Harbour Island is a thin three mile stretch of an island just east of Eleuthera known for its colonial architecture and magnificent beaches.

We rented a golf cart (the modality of transport for tourists and locals alike), puttered around narrow streets lined with pink oleander and purple bougainvillea, and tried to avoid both the tourists who would forget to drive on the left and some very ballsy rosters who seemed to have the run of the place.

The town was charming, but it wasn't the reason we made the trip to Harbour Island. We had come for the beach, which was colder and windier than I had expected – I wore a wetsuit top over my suit and for the first time Munch didn’t complain about her rash guard.

Guess who is getting far more use out of that infant life vest

Unfortunately the most famous aspect of this very famous beach isn’t  that obvious in this picture. Do you see it?

It’s the sand. Which is…

 Pink. Pink for Easter. I couldn’t have planned that better if I had tried.

cable beach to eleuthera

On our last night in Cable Beach we'd planned to visit the world's largest salt water aquarium at the Atlantis hotel - a short drive away on Paradise Island. Unfortunately we got word at 5pm that LD's system had just crashed and he would be delayed.

No worries. There was a steel drum player and age-appropriate aperitifs to be enjoyed in the hotel lobby's bar.

We waited. And did some mugging for the camera. 

Our best Blue Steel in Wow's first, um, bar

Sadly, LD didn't get back until almost 7pm, so we stayed in the bar, ordered some heavy appetizers, and called it a night. 

This morning we boarded a prop plane for Eleuthera. (I was wrong about the ferry to Eleuthera - there is one, but it takes three hours. For the same price, we opted for the 20 min fight instead. Don't worry, Wow's life vest will still get some use when we go to Harbour Island). 

Eleuthera is 50 miles east of New Providence. It's long and thin, hot and bright, and so quiet that, as we played along the scalloped edge of a powder blue sea, it felt as if we had the entire island to ourselves.

 Arrived! And exhausted.. 

Although the two bedroom condo is pretty comfy, we had to improvise some accommodations. 

time of her life

I am fairly certain that Munch is having the time of her life. She spent the trip over happily engaged in coloring books or the iPad, enjoying undivided daddy-time, two orange juices and, while a tropical storm temporarily shut down the Miami airport, a twenty-minute trip up and down and up and down the escalator.

This escalator trip, surrounded by fashionable travelers in a city known for its beautiful, well-dressed citizenry, allowed me to ponder yet again why I am incapable of traveling in anything other than yoga pants and a cotton shirt. I’d blame motherhood, but I’ve been traveling in variations of this slovenly state long before I had "potential spit-up" to use as an excuse.

We spent the first few days alternating play between white sand and shallow water. Now that Grammy is here we’ve been exploring the hotel’s pools. She’s getting accustomed to dessert after dinner, waking up next to her parents, and maraschino cherries in her lemonade.

And in the first half hour after meeting up with her Grammy, she’d convinced the weary traveler to buy her this –

I know it was only half an hour because that is the time span between when she left our hotel room in normal play clothes and when I met up with them for breakfast, at which point she was proudly showing off her new threads.  As she has taken off the dress only for pool time and bedtime, it is going to appear in our vacation pictures as if it was only item of clothing she had.

I am also having fun, and am able to relax far more now that my MIL is here. Wow and I have passed a few leisurely mornings next to the pool, where he sleeps and I people-watch.

catching up on some much needed r&r, poolside   

repeat, shoreline

The hotel crowd is an interesting mix of families with young children, men in itsy-bitsy swim wear, middle-aged attendants of some sort of financial convention, and the spring break scene, which has prompted a few inquires along these lines -

“Excuse me! Ladies? Ladies! LADIES! ARE YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL OR COLLEGE?? HIGH SCHOOL OR COLLEGE?”

The answer was, of course, high school. This was obvious to me, but perhaps when you are, oh like FORTY, it's not so obvious. 

safe in paradise

LD and I were walking home from dinner in Nassau on the last night of my first trip to the Bahamas when a man walked up behind me and grabbed the large clutch I held in the hand opposite of LD.

Without thinking I grabbed at him and caught his tee shirt. He spun away from me and in doing so the tee shirt ripped off his back. My grabbing his shirt provided just the delay that LD needed to come around the side of me and get his arms around the man’s chest.

The man threw my clutch on the street and LD let him go.

This is a fun story to tell at parties because it makes us both look like bad a$$es, even though grabbing that man in the street ranks as one of the dumbest things I have ever done. There was nothing in that clutch that would have been worth getting either one of us hurt. If it happened today, I hope I would have the presence of mind to just let it go.

That was eight years ago.

Although safety was a huge factor in deciding whether to make LD’s work trip into a family vacation, the attempted clutch-snatching episode wasn’t much of a consideration. (See, it’s just a fun story to tell…).  Wandering around deserted streets at night is inadvisable behavior in most cities in the world, even those, like Nassau, which are considered relatively safe. I very much wanted to go, and was not alone in my excitement.

My biggest concern was whether I could handle both Munch and Wow on my own. Wow, at 2.5 months, spends 80% of the hours between 6am and 9pm attached to me in some manner, and Munch, who at 3 thinks she can swim, would be difficult to keep safe near the ocean. The pools didn’t seem like any better an option, as none of them were shallow enough for Munch to be in unaccompanied. My in-laws were joining us, but not for a few days into the trip.

I packed the baby Bjorn, which I hate wearing, to free up both hands in case Munch decided to stage her own Baywatch scene.

I might have gone a bit, um, overboard in the other water-safety related preparations.

Forgive the mommy MD moment – the AAP recommends against the use of childrens’ flotation devices. That isn’t a flotation device, it’s a life vest, just in case the ferry to Eleuthera didn’t have an infant vest available.

Other health and safety preparations involved locating and refitting everyone’s rash guards, sun hats, and the stockpiling of various age and activity appropriate sunblocks.

So I was annoyed at myself when, as soon as we stepped foot on the sand, it became apparent that I had overlooked the simplest way to keep Munch either on the sand or near the water’s edge.

Courtesy of the hotel lobby’s gift shop, allow me to introduce The World’s Most Expensive Plastic Bucket and Shovel.

Q: What’s the best way to tell your kids had fun?

A: