This post will have to get broken up into parts. So consider this part one.
We went on a LONG weekend to see my brother and his family in Virginia Beach. It’s about a 7 hour ride from our house. We were supposed to leave early Friday morning. But with the warnings of Hurricane Bill, we left unexpectedly on Thursday night so we could still enjoy Friday at the beach. We thought we could drive through the night and arrive around 2am. We couldn’t make it. We gave up at 11pm and found a hotel in Eastern Maryland, near the Virginia border.
Have you noticed that vacationing with young children is really not a vacation for you? It’s so much work! And you’d think they’d be exhausted at 11pm. We walked into the hotel/motel lobby, and you would have thought they walked right into Magic Kingdom. They were laying on the couches in the lobby, yelling because they thought the echo effect was cool, and running to and from the sliding glass doors. We were so mortified, but we couldn’t calm them down!! I’m sure the receptionist was disappointed that she gave the 3rd to last room to us.
As soon as S realized that we were going right to sleep, she got whiny and teary. For about a 1/2 hr, in the dark, I could hear her telling my husband, “Daddy, I’m ready to go. I don’t need sleep.” And each time she did, M would sit up, blow S a kiss, and said, “Feel better. I’ll go, too.” As if they could just leave the 2 of them and hit the road. Trust me, I loved the idea when I was dead tired and just wanted to go to sleep. But there was no way that was happening. I fell asleep before anyone else. When I woke up briefly at 12:45am, the room was quiet. Everyone had fallen asleep.
At 6:45am, I felt breathing on my face. M was staring at me, not saying a word, but breathing on me. Kind of creepy yet sweet. By 7:30ish, we were back on the road, with S in tears saying she wanted to stay at the hotel (I’ve decided, I just can’t win with her on trips. I do my best to ignore it all, but it really grates on me when I’m tired, too).
We got to VA Beach by 10am. We literally dropped our thing in the house, got into our bathing suits, and went straight to the beach. It was awesome! A beautiful day, with a slight breeze, the waves were a little rougher than I would have liked. Bill was coming in, and I knew the waves were going to be CRAZY! It was so different than any of our other beach trips the last couple of years. So many surfers were way out. We could see dolphins out by them. I hear in the evenings, the sharks come out there, too! S and M couldn’t get enough of watching their older cousins boogie boarding. Together in the sand, they were digging huge sandpits, with bridges and tunnels connecting them. S pretty much stayed in the water the whole time. M started out that way, but got washed to shore by a couple of big waves. One of them knocked her right into the knee of a man who was trying to catch her and get out of her way. That sort of did her in for the rest of the day.
I get this feeling every time I see my girls with their cousins, from either of my brothers’ families. The cousins are older, both sets 10 and 8. Yet, they are so sweet to my girls. This family we saw have 2 boys. They totally take care of them. They couldn’t be more boy boys, and my girls, girly girls in comparison. But my kids have so much love and adoration for their boy cousins, and they have so much love and tenderness to my kids. It’s extremely sweet. We see each pair once a year if we are lucky. It’s just so hard to get down to VA or to IL. Each time we get ready to leave, I wish they had more opportunities to build that relationship. I never really got to see my cousins since most of them lived in another country. As a child, I felt that I really missed out. I had hoped that wouldn’t happen to my kids, too.
From the beach, we went back to their house, and straight into their pool. Watching them swim around so well, S found the confidence again to ditch her little bubble and swim around the pool without any flotation device. She was jumping off the diving board with them, having the time of her life. M wanted to get rid of hers, too. Not an option, but she gave it a whirl. She was okay where she could touch until she went into the deep end. My husband jumped to get her. She came up with her arms around him, grinning ear to ear, saying, “You saved me, Daddy.” We all had to roll our eyes. Will she ever learn her lesson?
We all went bowling together, too. S, for the first time, really got into it. She figured out when it was her turn, and did her little umph push to her ball. It took what seemed like an eternity for the ball to knock down the pins, but she was having so much fun with her cousins. M broke out into a dance when she knocked down her pins, yelling, “I won I won”. I last took them bowling about 4 months ago, and after the first 4 frames, they both just wanted to go home. This was the first time we found shoes in M’s size. She was ecstatic!! It takes so little sometimes to make them happy.
They didn’t want to leave. S cried on and off for about an hour on the drive back north, saying she wanted to stay with her cousins. Sweet and sad. More next time…And there is most definitely more!
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