Go jump in the lake
Let me preface this by saying that every single time we have plans to do something as a family, one or both of the children refuses to sleep the night before. Last night the baby didn’t get to sleep until 2, and she was up before 9.
Today we went to the lake. We packed up the kids and bathing suits and cooler and towels and snacks and headed out to Lake LBJ, where my brother and I are building a house. The baby screamed (bloodcurdlingly, at a volume setting of 11) all the way there.
I hadn’t seen the lakehouse since before they even staked out the foundation, and now it’s all framed up and they’re finishing putting on the raw roof. I don’t know what the technical term for the stage of completion is, but it was amazing to walk through the house and see in real life what I’d only seen on a piece of papar. I’m not the kind of girl who easily visualizes spatial references, so I just couldn’t picture what it was going to look like. I know now, and I can can sum it up in one word:
Huge.
Then I took the girls back to the car and started changing everyone’s clothes because like dunderheads we didn’t wear bathing suits on the way out there. The back doors of the Suburban swung shut on us. There I was trapped with 2 hot kids in the back of the car and no door handle to let us out easily. And I was naked from the waist down. Once I got some clothes on, I hauled my fat ass over the back seat with its accompanying kid carseats and let some fresh air into the car. Both girls had gotten prickly heat by this time.
We have a little beach area on our lot that the kids went wading in. The baby got her toes wet and started shivering. She’s like her mama – water’s only good when it’s 78 degrees or warmer. The 3 yo had to be dragged out of the water kicking and screaming. I think we know which one the water baby is.
We collected all the gear and loaded up the boat and got the life jackets on the kids which precipitated another round of screaming by the baby, who didn’t like her jacket. I could kind of understand that because it was the really uncomfortable kind of jacket that we had to wear on the cruise ship during the drill and I almost started hollering then, too.
So there we were in the boat, toting around a child who for all the world sounded like we were pulling out her toenails with pliers. People on the shore and other boats looked like they were about to call the cops on us. 2 minutes into our much-anticipated boat ride, we were pulling back in. The preparation took 3 times as long as the actual trip.
I think next time we’ll just have to get special toddler life vests. I even think they’ll enjoy boat rides. I’d expected the older one to freak out once we started moving, but she just grinned. She only told hub to slow down once. This is good news for our plans to buy a boat of our own.
I was pretty meh about the whole lakehouse thing, but now I’m really excited. I can’t wait for it to be finished. I have a feeling that we’ll start camping out in it as soon as they run water. Who needs carpet and paint?