Gear for the beach

As some of you know, our family takes a big trip to the beach each summer. This summer will mark our fourth time to take William to the beach.

As I was talking with one of the other people who will be going to the beach with us, I started reminiscing about all the stuff that we had to take with us to the beach the last few times to accommodate William. When he was three months old, we were flying in from California, so we prevailed upon Diane, who generously lugged along a Pack-n-Play and a bouncy seat for us. The next year, William was one, so we still brought the Pack-n-Play but ditched the bouncy seat in favor of a booster seat for the table and a gigantic basket of toys. Last year, we brought the inflatable bed and the booster seat and toys, both for the house and the beach. Each year, we had to slightly adjust the specific type of gear that we brought, but the end effect was the same: we were Sherpas for our son.

This year, however, will be the most gear-free year we've ever had. Pretty much we'll be bringing toys. No stroller. No travel bed (we're planning to have William sleep in a twin bed in a room with the other little boy, Graham, who will be coming to the beach). No special seating. Just toys. And yet this is the year we finally have a minivan and could actually fit all the extra stuff in! Ah well.

$$$

I've discovered there have been three times when I've been delighted to realize that I'm actually saving some money.

The first was breastfeeding. Free. Well, except for all the necessary supplies, like nursing bras, nursing pads, etc. But still, overall, very cheap. For those of you who have never breastfed, let me put this in perspective: a can of formula costs, at minimum, $22, and it might last you, oh, several days. Ouch, right?

The second was when William switched over to whole milk around his first birthday. I'd been giving him some formula in a sippy cup with meals for awhile because I'd had to give up the ghost of pretending the pump did any good for either of us. But even a small amount of formula each day cost $$$. A can of formula might cost $22, but a gallon of milk is only about $3. Plus, you can buy milk nearly everywhere, which is nice and convenient. Well, everywhere except airline flights, apparently. Ahem.

The third is the biggie, though. No more diapers! That's right, about ten days ago, we declared William to be officially potty-trained. You don't realize how much you're spending on diapers and PullUps until you no longer have to buy them. That's the beauty of underpants: they come in cool patterns AND they last much, much longer. Oh yes, and they are cleaner. I do not miss regularly spending $18 or $20 on a big pack of Pampers, nor do I miss buying the even-more-costly PullUps. We're still using PullUps at night, but we probably won't even have to do that much longer; once we finish the pack we have, I think that'll be the end of that.

So you'd think we'd have all this extra cash now, wouldn't you? Sadly, no. We can always find other things to spend it on...

Splat

You can't keep a good man down.

William went running down the sidewalk this evening, and unfortunately that mean old sidewalk reached up and tripped him. Down he went, SPLAT. The result was a skinned knee, two skinned palms, wounded pride and lots of tears.




















However, a green popsicle and some hugs and kisses and attention from Mommy and Daddy can make it all better. Oh yes, and six band-aids. (Were all six necessary? No. But when you're three, you have to milk these occasions for all you can. Oh the drama.)

That's enough

William said the most hilarious thing that I've heard him say in a long time on Friday afternoon.

When he woke up from his nap, I told him that we were going to the swimming pool. I handed him a bathing suit, and asked him to start getting ready. As he tends to do when he hasn't had enough sleep, he got all upset and irrational and began crying and kicking and screaming. (Seriously. He loves the pool. It's not like I was telling him to get ready to go have teeth extracted or something.) I let him carry on for awhile and mostly just ignored him, knowing that eventually he'd run out of steam.

So I was downstairs in the kitchen, listening to him rant and rave on the staircase and packing up the bag with our towels and sunscreen, when the crying came to a sudden halt. And I heard a little voice say, quite calmly, "Well, that's enough of THAT! Whew." (And I think he may have even said, "That's enough of that nonsense" because he did say that later, but I don't know if he actually said it the first time.) I heard him come pitter-pattering down the stairs and around the corner and say something about how it was almost too late and it's a good thing that he stopped crying when he did. And he was calm and happy and ready to go swimming. So. Bizarre.

Cheekwood photos

A little taste of Family Night at Cheekwood last week for you.

William, about to follow Leland down to the front where they could dance:















William and Leland sharing food, a not uncommon phenomenon with these two:

Rise and shine

The 5:30 a.m. wakeups continue. Ay yi yi. Do you know how early 5:30 a.m. is? Do you know how early it is when your three-year-old stalled about going to sleep until 10 p.m. (!) the night before?

Y'all know me. You know that I've been fairly rigid about William's bedtime as long as he's had one. Unless there's a special occasion or we have company visiting, we expect William to go to bed at his bedtime, settle down and stay in bed, end of story. It even worked until very recently. We didn't even have that much trouble after the transition to the big boy bed, except for a few nights. But these late-evening stalling episodes are just delaying his actual bedtime, and because he's getting up early no matter what, it's just reducing the total amount of sleep he's going. Which is Not Good. Oy.

Due to the stalling and the early rising, I'm estimating that William got about seven hours of sleep last night. Maybe seven-and-a-half. That's enough for me to function, but this is William we're talking about. High Octane Boy. Without enough sleep, he tends to get wired and wired and more wired, and that just exacerbates the problem because then he gets too wired to settle down. And it just snowballs.

I think I could deal if it was just nighttime stalling or just early wakeups, but both? No. We've tried everything we could think of to nip this in the bud, but so far, nothing's worked. Some friends have given me a couple of new ideas--set an alarm to come on when it's time to get up and explain the time on the digital clock to him and tell him what number will be showing when it's time to get up--so we may try those soon.

Feel free to remind me about all this when William's 15, and I'm trying to drag his body out of bed so he won't be late to high school.

Adventures in swimming

It's been extremely hot* and miserable here the last few days in the Country Music Capital of the World, although it looks beautiful from inside a nice air-conditioned house.

Yesterday morning, David had to work at the clinic, so William and I got up early and made it to the neighborhood pool by around 9:30. We scored one of the few umbrellas, and then we splashed in the baby pool for a little while.

Eventually, William worked up some courage and dragged me off to the big pool, where we spent the next 45 minutes "swimming." For William, "swimming" entails his flinging himself off the side of the pool and my frantic efforts to catch him before his dead weight plummets like an anchor to the bottom. For some reason, he likes to jump down, not out, so it's always an adventure for me, trying to catch him before he goes completely under the water. Then I hold him and propel him around the rest of the pool so he can talk to all his people. He visited Libby the Baby in her floaty thing with her parents in the middle of the pool, the gaggle of shaggy kindergarteners in the shallow end, and the cute bigger girls in between. He also wanted to start a water fight with some of the slightly older boys, but they (thankfully) didn't think that was such a good idea--instead, they waited for him to ask them to squirt him with their water guns and then gently sprayed him on his tummy.

There was a moment of drama when he realized that the Sleeping Beauty figurine that he kept in his bathing suit pocket was missing. We then paddled around the pool frantically looking for it, until a little girl found it and dove down to fetch it for him.

At one point, I hoisted William up to the side of the pool so he could jump off again, but he stopped and studied a small sign on the pool edge. He pointed to the sign, which read "4 ft" and asked "Why does that have a 4 on it?"

I explained, "The water is four feet deep here. You're only a little over three feet tall, so if you stood on the bottom of the pool, the water would be over your head, and you might not want that to happen. So the sign says four feet."

William looked at the sign dubiously. "I have two feet," he said, looking at his two feet and then looking all around, as if he was expecting to see some mythical swimmer with four feet who belonged in this part of the pool.

So we moved off from the four-footed-swimmer's part of the pool, back to the shallow end, to collect the squirty dinosaur toys. Then we sat under our umbrella, ate snacks from Trader Joe's and watched more people show up, even though it was really starting to heat up. We came home, showered, ate lunch, and played SuperWhy games on the computer together. William's getting pretty good at those, too. If he could actually read, he'd be a menace.

It was a really nice morning together, regardless of the heat. I'm glad we went early, too, because it was about 100 degrees by about 4 p.m. and there was no way I would have taken him to the pool then.

(*No, it's not been as hot as it was in 29 Palms. But it is way more humid here.)

California, here they come

I have to write down as much as I remembered about a little discussion we had last night with William.

You know how William adores castles and loves to talk about his "castle people"? Well, last night, he informed us, with great seriousness, that the castle people were moving out of their castle.

We gasped in mock surprise. And then William told us that they were moving to California, where they were going to move into another castle there. The knights apparently will stay in the old castle here. I didn't realize that the knights weren't considered part of the "castle people" but apparently they're not. Also, who knew there were so many castles out there, especially in a country that's not even a monarchy?

This whole little bit reminded me of my little brother when he was about William's age. John had these two stuffed things that he slept with at night; one was a soft Fisher Price doll that John called Blue Baby and the other was a shapeless lump of pale yellow cotton called, yes, Yellow Baby. Once, John apparently misplaced his babies, which would normally be cause for major alarm. But instead, he calmly informed us that "Yellow Baby and Blue Baby went camping." Where did he get that? Who knows? At least we can hazard a guess as to where William got his idea for his castle people to go west!

By the way, William just now informed me the new castle in California would be near the beach and it would be "an orange, green and yellow kind of castle." That would be a most, er, interesting-looking castle, don't you think? The castle will also have a lot of "new knights with round heads and helmets with visors on them that come up and down." I can't make this stuff up.