My good friend Laura, the randomly assigned OSU college roommate, soon a good friend and later a bridesmaid at my wedding, that I then reconnected with 10 years after we graduated college when she came to Raleigh to get her PhD at NCSU for 3 years (coincidentally having her office in the exact same building Zac worked in) and that, since she moved back to DC in 2014 I've had nearly weekly phone calls with....this person invited us to join her and her family (husband, 1.5 yr old daughter, 7 month old fetus) at the beach condo they'd rented on the Isle of Palms in the path of totality for the 2017 solar eclipse.
So Friday after afternoon, after packing in the evenings all week in small increments, we loaded up the van and drove for five hours to the South Carolina coast in hopes of seeing the sun's corona and experiencing this rare event in all its totality.
Traffic on the way down was not bad, and Simon whined a lot, but we made it ok with the help of lots of gummy fruit snacks. We will pay for this later in dentistry bills, I'm sure.
We arrived around ten pm, and poor Simon was on his last leg so that when we pulled into the resort area, he started crying and saying he wanted to go home. Getting him out of his car seat, holding him, and letting him push the elevator button that was the same number as his age (4) soothed him.
We soon got everyone to bed, because we had to wake up early the next morning to go on a boat ride that Laura had booked for everyone.
On Friday, Simon's daycare was closed, but it was my second day of class, and Zac was super busy at work, so I hired one of my former students, Kate Rhudy, (now graduated) to babysit him for the day.
She told me she taught him how to ride a bike. I didn't think much of it, but sure enough, Simon can now ride a bike!
Over the past week, we've been eating our supper out on the deck with some company.
First there was one vulture, then two, and one day there were three. They would spend time on our neighbor's roof, and sometimes hop over to ours. One day, when we were inside, one even landed on our deck.
I was playing around with my phone during the tedious feeding-Simon-his-bedtime-snack, and discovered a new feature in Facebook. (It's apparently just like SnapChat, which I don't use.) Anyway, the kids and I had some fun with it.
Although Alice really wants to play on the iPad in the morning, we have recently started prohibiting it. Because, lo and behold, kids will be creative when they're not being entertained. Alice has created some cool artwork lately. (For the record, Simon has very little interest in the iPad so far).
I'm not sure exactly why, but Simon has made it to the ripe old age of four without ever having a bowl of cereal. Zac gave him one this morning, and he ate it up.
Almost every evening, as soon as he gets home, Simon asks to go drive his car on the road. Usually we eat supper first, then let him spend the time between that and bednight snack cruising around the cul-de-sac. I just can't get over how cute he is in the little pedal car.
This week, Alice attended summer camp at the Method Rd. community center, near Simon's daycare (because I'm all about convenience.) After her first day, Alice said that "Oscar from my preschool" was there. Oscar's parents (who also have younger siblings still at the daycare) evidently made the same choice for a similar reason--it's all about making life just a bit easier.
Since I go back to work on Friday, Alice will go to camp for four weeks straight until her school starts at the end of August.
At this camp, based on the schedule, they do a different activity or game approximately every half-hour (which seems exhausting to me!). They have lunch, and snack, and two days a week go on a field trip.
On Sunday morning, the sky was finally clear and the most gorgeous blue you could imagine!
The air was still cool, but the kids were soon ready to go swimming.
Zac and I took turns watching the kids at the beach and packing up. I took these pics to capture the site before our tent was down. We'll definitely be coming back to this one!
When not in the water, Simon had no problem coming up with fun activities. One thing he liked to do was stir up the fire ash and declare, "I'm making smoke!" So if he has lung cancer later in life, this is why. He also did some more glow stick rolling. None of the rolls in this video went very well, but he did get it to roll all the way down to the beach one time.
I gave everyone a big morning snack (followed by a nice piece of chocolate) to prevent breakdowns upon our arrival at home. We left around 12:30, trying to get home in time to give the kids a proper, and much needed, nap in their own beds.
Of course, they still fell asleep in the van on the way home, despite our best efforts. So we left them in the van while we scurried around getting as much unpacking done as we could before they woke up. They were a bit droopy that afternoon.
Saturday morning came early, as this time it was Simon who awoke at the crack of dawn. Our picnic table was all wet from the night's rain, so we had breakfast in the camp chairs facing the lake.
Then it was time to swim and play at the beach! It would alternate all day between getting dark and having a sprinkling of rain, then the sun would pop out for a few minutes, then it would get dark again and drizzle. But it was manageable.
We enjoyed our beach that was mostly ours, but the neighboring campsites could also use it. Right around naptime on Saturday, a family moved into the site next to ours, bringing a few kids and speed boat. The family was nice, but our pristine view and private cove were compromised by their boat sitting in it.
Simon was delighted that we had a fire. His favorite thing to do is throw things into it to make the sparks fly up in the air. He spend all evening hopping and buzzing around the forest gathering bit of wood to chuck into the fire. He did this even once it was pitch black and we had to put a headlamp on him.
That night, we got out the glow sticks and Alice made two necklaces out of them. Simon figured out he could roll his glowstick loop into the woods in the dark and then chase it. This kid is seriously not afraid of the dark woods at night!
I was a bit nervous spending most of Friday packing up for this camping trip, given that rain and thunderstorms were forecast. But we decided to go for it anyway, since Falls Lake was only 40 minutes away, and thunderstorms were so unpredictable that it seemed pointless to cancel a trip just on the chance of storms. But to put this in perspective, I absolutely HATE packing, and I feel like I spend half of the summer packing up for all our trips. The problem is, I love taking trips, so I've got to pack. But to spend a day packing for something that might not happen was just unfathomable, so that's part of why we decided to just plow ahead.
In a miracle of discipline, I had everything all packed up and ready to go when Zac got home with the kids around 4:30. I'd even ordered our Chinese Food take out that we would pick up along the way and eat at the campsite for supper.
On the drive to the site, I checked the weather compulsively. There was a large front headed our way, but it looked like we might dodge a bullet because the storm was split apart and seemed like we could pull a Moses and have the storms split around us. But, when we arrived, I informed Zac that minutecast was predicting rain starting in about 15 minutes. I told him to set up the tent immediately, while I took the kids down to check out the beach and then got them started on supper.
We'd scouted this site (#129) out about two years ago and noted it because it was lake-front site with a large beach, nice swimming cove, and a nice woodsy lot as well. It was our first time at this site and it did not disappoint! The beach was lovely!
Then I hurried the kids back up to the picnic table and got them started on the Chinese food while Zac finished putting up the tent. Just as he finished, it started pouring down rain. We grabbed our food and had a picnic inside the tent (which luckily didn't have any of our stuff in it yet). When Alice was done eating, she kept jumping over the food so we put her in time out in the corner of the tent and didn't let her out until she read an entire fortune all by herself.
The rain was pretty intense, like a torrential downpour, and the tent started leaking a bit. But the rain soon let up, so we went back outside. I could see on the radar that another storm was coming in about an hour, so we figured we'd let the kids play at the beach a bit, then just get ready for bed early and be back in the tent by the time it came through.
The air was cool, but the water was so warm, that it took a while for the kids to realize they were freezing and turning blue. We got the kids out and dried off and into clean, warm clothes, and it started raining again just as we were getting ready for bed. We brushed our teeth under the shelter of the back van door.
It should be noted that Simon was extremely disappointed that we were camping but did not have a campfire on this first night. In his mind, the entire purpose in camping is to have a fire, so this was a bit baffling for him.
Once in the tent, the kids were bonkers as we tried to set up the beds and make dams out of towels to contain the pools forming in each of the four corners of the tent. It was an adventure! The rain was so loud we had to wait a while before I could even read bedtime stories to the kids. Alice is actually a great little camper when it comes time to sleep. She gets right in her sleeping bag and seems to pass out immediately, or at least does a good job of staying still and not talking. Simon, on the other hand, is much better than the dive-bombing whirling dervish he was when we first took him camping two years ago, but he still wants to snuggle a lot, and lay on you, and squirm around and takes a long time to get situated. After an hour of trying to get him to sleep, he announced he needed to pee, so I took him out. After that, he soon fell asleep and eventually I did as well.
Simon loves to jump and buzz. One time he asked me why he doesn't fly when he flaps his arms. I think he believes that if he just practices enough and tries really hard, he will start flying one of these days.
Alice had been wanting to go fishing again for a while, but never finished supper quickly enough to have enough time for an expedition. But finally, this evening, she ate quickly and she and Zac went down to the pond, while I stayed with Simon until he finished eating. Right when Simon and I got down there, they caught a little blue gill. Later they got a catfish.
This week, Alice is at an afternoon camp called "Mad Lab" from 1-4pm at the Pullen Community Center, where they do science experiments. She came home the first day with some gooey stuff to play with. Yay. More mess.
Although the loves the camp, it's really inconvenient logistically. It doesn't help me much because afternoons were nap time anyway. Also, due the timing, I have to pick her up and drop her off, cutting down on my free time. Next year I think I will only sign her up for full-day camps. But this one seemed too perfect for her to pass up, and indeed, she had a lot of fun.
On Saturday I took the kids to the pool so Zac could hang up some more pictures without the kids underfoot. We tested out the new raft we got Simon for his birthday. The kids were pretty creative in coming up with all sorts of ways to use it. Simon mostly liked to be pushed around on it (which I couldn't video and keep my phone safe).
