We're not in Kansas Anymore, Toto.

Sunrise, Sunset.

Hello from Sunny San Diego.  We're holed up in the hotel room this evening, the boys are snuggled up on their bed watching the Heffalump movie, my husband is down in the laundry room switching loads, and I am...well, I'm blogging!  With a glass of wine in hand!  And a sore body and a full tummy!  Welcome to my vacation!

We have been going 90 to nothing since we got here.  Thursday we went to Disneyland with some friends.  Just in case you were wondering, over the Christmas to New Years holiday is probably not the quietest time to go to Disneyland, Oh my God there were so many people there.  We were nine strong, four adults, four kids between 3 and 6, and one teenage babysitter who got a free ticket to come along and help us keep track.  You would think five grownups to four kids would be a pretty sweet ratio, but you would be wrong.  At one point, we lost Drew, for about five of the most terrifying minutes of my life, and probably his.  We had just come off the Pirates of the Caribbean boat ride, and were cutting through the que line to get back to the main walkway, ducking under ropes and cutting through the line, all of us thinking he was ahead or behind with the others.  When we got to the other side and stopped and did a headcount, we were only eight people.  I looked back in the direction we had just come from to find a sea of people, all moving in different directions.  My husband and the other dad set off on foot to retrace steps, I immediately climbed up on a light pole with a concrete base and started scanning faces from 15 feet up, hoping he might see me.   The employee who was manning the entrance to the line for the Pirates ride yelled at me to get down, and I yelled right back at him "I am missing a blond 6 year old boy in a light blue t-shirt - leave me the hell alone and start looking!"  People below me gasped and started counting their own kids and craning their necks around to look, and send the message up the line like falling dominos.

After just a few minutes, my cellphone rang, a number from Denver, Colorado which I didn't recognize.

"Hello?  I have a little boy here...?"  He was less than 100 feet away, through 500 people.  He had done what we had told him to do if he got lost: find someone in a uniform or with a name tag and give them my cellphone number, which he has memorized.  This woman, a visitor to the park and not an employee, but a mommy herself, had noticed him standing there looking a little panicked and stopped to talk to him.  She knew something was not right.  And right about the time she was trying to describe to me where she was standing, my husband saw them.

So it worked out fine, but suffice to say Drew was freaked enough that I carried him almost to the entrance of the park, we had decided that was about all the excitement we could handle for one day.

Today we went to the zoo, much calmer, mostly because we have been to the San Diego Zoo so many times we know our way around, so even though it was pretty busy, we felt much more comfortable.  And also I think despite the scary moments, we all, Drew included, feel a little better knowing our emergency plan works.  But the boys are exhausted, daddy is exhausted, I am exhausted.  Tonight we caught a beautiful sunset while driving up highway 101, and ate fish and chips for dinner. I am going to yoga in the morning, I've already caught one class yesterday, plus all the park/zoo walking. 

Tomorrow is new years eve.  We hope to catch an early dinner at our favorite mexican restaurant and crash early.  So exciting, I know. 

[Working Title]

Hi!  Its Sunday again.  And I have really nothing else to say.

Yep.  That's me.  Totally blocked.  Whistling Dixie over here, folks.  Can't even come up with a title, as you can see.  I can however, possibly, put together a kind of outline of a story, or maybe just some bullet-points of what happened to me over the weekend for you, just to give you an idey-ho of what's really going on here.

• Friday, 4:00.  I decide now would be a fabulous time to take the boys with me to the mall, to buy Drew a new winter coat, since the one he has, purchased off the street in China for 15 bucks and you get what you pay for, has a broken zipper and therefore does him no good.  This mall, where the Sears is, with the magic little Land's End store inside, is several miles away through major traffic congestion, including one of the top 20 worst intersections in the entire country (that was a few years ago that I heard that, but I doubt its gotten better since).
• Friday, 4:20.  Well that was a stupid idea.  I should give up and go home. 
• Friday, 4:40.  We've moved about 1/8 of a mile.  The boys are starting to sense my stress, and start fussing because of it.  Its like how animals smell fear and then attack.
• Friday, 5:05.  Am finally broken free of the standstill traffic and on my way home, (I traveled a total of about 2 miles in a giant circle since 4:00) but am still a little buzzed from the stress. 
• While idling at a red light, trying to calmly talk to the boys about how it would really help me to deal with traffic if they could just sit quietly and keep hands and feet to themselves, I look up to realize I'm not pushing down hard enough on the brake and am rolling into the guy in front of me.  My foot is totally paralyzed as my brain sends a panic message, finally it pushes down just as I ram the guy's bumper.  A guy who, while totally nice and very calm, happens to have an infant in the back seat.  This all took place in about .35 seconds, but it felt like a full 10 seconds, it felt like I should have had enough time to stop my car, except that suddenly my legs and feet were filled with concrete.  It felt like a dream. 
• I had enough time to gasp and yell Oh Shit! Just as I hit him.
• Also just as the boys stopped yelling and kicking each other, and so there was no other noise in the car to muffle my words. Even better!  I'm crashing into babies and burning my own children's ears!  Fabulous!

So that was fun.  The man was very nice.  It truly was not a hard hit, it was more of an aggressive nudge.  If I hadn't had a stupid front license plate as is required in California (but not here in Kansas), there would have been not even a scratch on his car, but the bolts holding the license plate on left a lovely little octagon shaped imprint.

That set the tone for my weekend, although nothing else bad happened.  I'm actually looking forward to tomorrow, so I can start another week and put this one behind me.  However, Will came to me right before bedtime to show me the bright red itchy rash on his belly, which looks just like the one Drew had earlier in the week (which, you may remember, was from having Strep throat.) 

So, I have that going for me.

Breakdown.

Hmmm, this post is probably not what you think its going to be.  Because I know you are all expecting me to have a breakdown, at any second, and sometimes I feel like that, too, but today is not that day.

No, this breakdown is regarding cars.  Thankfully, cars which belong to other people.  This morning, at sevengoddamnthirty, our doorbell rings.  Trip and are still in bed at this moment.  Should we have been?  No, but we are tired, and we drank a little more wine than was necessary for a spaghetti dinner last night, because Trip had  a frightfully bad day at work yesterday, way past Craptastic, creeping more toward something like Craptacular, but probably more like Fucktacular, and yes the capital is necessary. 

So I stumble into my robe and to the front door, totally confused, afraid that maybe it is really 8:30, not just 7:30, and Drew's carpool ride is here, and I am answering the door in my robe to a dad who sometimes trusts me with his children, and that might be bad.  But no, it is a woman, whom I've never before seen.  And she is so sorry, but her car has died right in front of my house, and her cellphone is apparently dead, and can she use my phone to call TripleA.  So I get her the phone, and I start some coffee, and other people in my home start rallying, and little boys in their pajamas start running through the house as if waking from 10 hours of sleep is like turning the switch on the bottom of the Energizer Bunny.  First they were off, and comatose, and now suddenly they are on, and they are off and running.  In the kitchen, but its a little early for me to be handling knives anyway, so no worries. 

So this poor woman is a teacher, and she lives in the neighborhood, and after dropping her daughter off at the school up the street she was driving on to work, driving her husband's car which she hardly ever has to do except today he needed her car for some reason (isn't this always the case?) and now its dead as a doornail.  So she calls her school so they can scramble around for a sub, and then her husband, whom I think was very unhelpful and she was a little frustrated.  By now Drew has decided to make friends and starts talking up a storm about his life and he'sfiveandinkindergartenanddoesshe-knowhisteacherbecauseheknowspeoplewhogoto-schoolwithherdaughterandhesgoingtohavea-spidermanbirthdayandmaybetheycan-comeandbringalltheirfriends, too.  All with waffle in his mouth.  You'd think he doesn't get out much.  And then neither my husband or I were surprised that she thanked us very nicely for letting her use the phone but she'll just go wait in the car, thanks, and she backed her way toward the door.

And then.  The towtruck came.  And there was much screaming.  THE TOWTRUCK IS HERE, MOM!  A REAL TOWTRUCK!  AND ITS WHITE!  AND IT HAS THREE RED A's ON IT! AND ITS A TOWTRUCK!

People, its not even 8 o'clock in the morning on a Thursday, and he has already had so much excitement we might as well call it a day and go back to bed.

That sounds good to me.

The waves, DUDE, the waves!

Today in Southern California, a massive storm somewhere out in the pacific caused the surf to hit a high not seen since the 1998 El Nino.  Surfers have been all a-twitter about it for days.  Twenty foot waves!  It could take out the Ocean Beach Pier!  Let's go!  The San Diego Lifeguard Captain, or whoever makes these kind of decisions, closed several of the beach access points and issued a bulletin that only the most experienced surfers should get into the water today.  Go here to read about it from the San Diego Tribune, there's also some pretty amazing pictures.

We have friends here who run the gamut of surfer sterotypes - the reality is, when everybody surfs, the stereotypes don't quite match up.  There's the guy that runs a mutual fund for a financial company downtown, who leaves work every day at 2pm (when the market closes) and hits the waves on his way home, almost every day, regardless of how good the surf might actually be.  He just likes to be in the water, and he's been surfing since he was a kid.  He doesn't like to have to work really hard at it.  He reads the paper or checks up with friends about where the good surf might be, but he usually prefers to go off in a quieter area even if the waves aren't as good, thus to avoid the newbies and jackass show-offs.  Today, with the surf as high as it was, he went out for a little while but found it too big to be fun.

There's the stay-home-dad who drops his kids off at school in the morning, then launches in at the cove right here in our little town.  He usually looks for an easy surf, he learned to surf as an adult.  He likes to take the technical approach, checking the internet constantly for updates to weather systems and approaching patterns that might change the height of the waves in one direction or the other.  He didn't go out today, it was way to big for him to handle. 

And then there's the former lifeguard, also a stay-home-dad.  He's weathered tan and fairly shaggy, who can look out his bedroom window at the whitecaps and tell you what's happening with the waves.  No reading the paper, no checking on the internet.  He gives off an aura of being like a surfer-dude shamen.  And he only goes out when its big.  Today, he stayed out all morning.  This is as good as it gets for him.

I took the kids down to La Jolla Cove to watch the big waves crash and the few surfers who were in the water try to get up on their boards.  It looked very futile to me.  But the waves really were enormous.  One lifeguard guy walked by and said they'd pulled only about 6 people out of the water at that spot all day, but apparently at other spots along the coast there had been lots of rescues.  The lifeguards were circling the surfers on waverunners, basically just hanging out, waiting for someone to be in trouble.  This guy said they only pull them out if they've lost their board and it looks like they are really struggling, then they tow them in and go back for the board later, usually by then its been smashed into bits against the rocks anyway (Hello?!?)

At one point I looked out over the rocks and saw what I first thought was a dog paddling along, then I realized it was a seal.  One lone seal brave enough to paddle around in these tsunami like waves, amongst a bunch of crazy people. 

PS - Did you notice 2 of the 3 guys are stay-home-dads?  As in, the mommy brings home the bacon?  AND, both of them have housekeepers (once a week) and gardeners (what we midwesterners call a yard service - also once a week).  I'm really not sure if there's just more of a propensity for that here in SoCal, or if we just happen to know the only two.  But I can tell you this:  Trip would really like to figure out how to get himself a gig like that.   

PPS - And now I give you, pictures!  The boys snuggling!  The Christmas tree, about to be overwhelmed by presents!  The stockings hung with care, or rather, laid out on the back of the wingback chair!  Because, take note, the mantle?  To my fireplace?  Is granite.  Nowhere to screw in a tiny little teacup hook in order to hang stockings.  Yes, I suppose I could get some of these stocking holder thingies, but then, I'm trying to avoid any head injuries and trips to the emergency room this holiday, Mkay?

 

Priorities.

Trip: "You should schedule an appointment with my new dentist.  You would like him."

Me: "No, what I really need is pedicure and a brow wax."

Trip: (Squints eyes at me for a moment to decide if I am kidding, then hangs head in defeat.)

Divorce is...good?

Could someone please explain to me how it workes out that when you are divorced, with children, that every other weekend you get a break?  You get an entire weekend to yourself while a person whom you were once committed to and now barely tolerate in public spends time with his children?  And how, this works out for you as a benefit?  Could someone please tell me how exactly this is fair?

I currently have two friends in this situation.  And I know they love their children.  And I know that the last couple of years have been difficult for everyone in their respective families while they get it all sorted out.  And of course I realize divorce is not good.  I'm just really wondering about this added perk that comes with it.  Because we are all searching for a break sometimes.  How much would I love to have every other Saturday morning to myself?  To sleep in as late as I want, watch what I want on TV, keep the house clean for 24 hours, go shopping alone, or for crying out loud, spend time with friends?  What would I give for this freedom, on a regular schedule?

Nothing.  Absolutely not a dime.  But the thought remains....