Because we plan on relaxing when we're in the old folks home, we'd booked at trip to visit the Burlington family and to go with them to their swimming pool the day after we got back from Ohio. Zac was dreading getting back in the van after so much driving, but compared to our recent trip, an hour's drive to Burlington seemed like nothing.
So off we went, after naps, to visit with Grandpa Arcaro and family. When we arrived at their house, we quickly changed into suits, slathered on the sunblock, then piled back in the van and followed them to their pool. Alice loves swimming, and mostly just kicked around in her water wings contraption. Simon occasionally let me or Zac hold him in the main pool, but mostly he just stood in the baby pool lining up his toy boats and cars on the side. He took no advantage of being in the water.
At supper, Ami asked me how the trip to Ohio was. Given that neither kid was eating, even although Tom and Ami had cooked delicious homemade pizza, I just said, "Pretty much like this. The visits were fun, but the meals were difficult."
We drove home late, but surprisingly neither kid fell asleep on the way. Alice kept looking for lightening bugs and was so sad at the end of the drive that she hadn't seen any, she almost started crying. She tends to personify everything and imagines that the world cares about her, so on the lightning bugless drive, she kept making sad statements like, "The lightning bugs don't like me! They don't want me to see them! They're all hiding from me." I would occasionally try to console her by saying things like, "The lightning bugs don't even know you exist."
With a little help from Peppa, we gave the kids a hearty bedtime snack (to compensate for not having eaten supper) and packed them off to bed.
The next morning, we went to one of Alice's daycare friend's birthday parties, held at a pool. There's no such thing as too much swimming for Alice, and she was delighted to once again be presented with a large body of water to kick around in.
The kids were tired due to the late night, and no doubt a bit run down from the Ohio trip, but they held it together pretty well. Simon wouldn't even let me put him down in the baby pool, so we just took turns holding him in the large pool, while Alice swam around with her friends. Alice only had one incident where she got in a fight with another kids over a blue pool noodle. According to Alice, the kid just took it from her, but since I didn't see the beginning of the incident myself, I only half-believed Alice's version of the story. Alice tends to think any toys in her vicinity that she covets or has recently touched qualifies as being in her possession.
When it was birthday cake time, Simon and Alice were both excited: Alice because she loves cake and Simon because he loves candles. But the parents had forgotten the candles! Oh, poor Simon. He kept saying, looking with earnest blue eyes, "Mommy, where's the candles?" Over and over and over again.
After the cake, we let the kids play on the pool's little playground and Simon started nodding off in the swing. We decided to take our tuckered out kids home.
