Snippets from a family vacation
We arrived at my brother’s house and the kids wen barreling from the car. Adults followed at a more sedate pace. After all of the “”hello, how are you” we noticed that there was a significant lack of running, shouting, thumping, and laughing. The kids had all vanished. We found them in the garage. They were cooing and cuddling the batch of five-day-old kittens that my brother’s cat provided. Six children cuddling six little bundles of fur. It was adorable.
“What are you doing?” asked Kiki as Howard rocked a mounted-in-tire-and-cement tether ball pole into a tipped position.
“Well,” Howard answered. “It used to be that if I could get it tipped, then I could let it fall back into place and it would catapult me into the air.” He let the pole fall. He bounced, but did not catapult. “But I”m heavier now.” He sighed. Howard’s eyes met mine. I started the sentence but he finished it with me. “I need a bigger one.” I love knowing him so well that I know what he’ll say.
My brother uses old tires in his garden. He didn’t plant a garden this year because he was too busy moving, so the tires were laying in a pile. I turned and noticed Patch standing still while Gleek carefully lifted a tire over his head. It joined the stack of two which had already been stacked around him. Patch, grinning from ear to ear, was up to his shoulders in stacked tires. I was just pondering whether the fun they were having was worth the inevitable filth that playing with tires would produce, when my sister in law spoke up.
“Oh don’t let them play with those. There are spiders in them.”
I hollered this warning over to Patch and Gleek. Patch’s smile dissolved, and he hugged his arms close to his body. Gleek, impressed with the urgent need of getting Patch out of the rind of spider-infested tires, began lifting the top one back off. This caused Patch to squeal in terror because a spider might land on his head. Patch’s panic level was rising by the second.
Fortunately all of this only took seconds and I was only a few steps away. I lifted Patch out of the ring of sideriffic terror and inspected him for crawly things. There weren’t any, but Patch needed extra hugs just in case. No one touched the tires after that.
Trying to keep track of kids at a public pool on Labor Day weekend is like an extended game of Where’s Waldo, but you can only see heads and Waldo is allowed to move around. Oh, and there is the chance that if you don’t find Waldo, he might drown. We had bunches of fun, but it was not relaxing fun for the parents. The hotel pool had no water slides, but my kids were the only ones in the water, so I could just sit off to the side and relax.