The Race Weekend, Part 1

Besides an awesome race (which I will write about in another post), this weekend was fantastic for many other reasons, including great family time and funny moments. It started out in a pretty stressful way, with me not having gotten all of the packing done Friday night (because I was exhausted and thought that sleeping would be a good idea) and then waking up Saturday with nearly no voice, feeling quite under the weather. Our scheduled departure time was 10AM; the following picture was taken a little after 11AM on the street in front of my house. (For the record, my house looks NOTHING like those across the street...ours is about 30 years older.)

You may notice in that picture that there are three motorcycles and four adults.  My parents made the trip with us on this gorgeous early fall weekend.  My mom, dad, and John all took their motorcycles, and I followed in the car with the kids, rocking out to Kids Place Live most of the way.

 

The fourth motorcycle is that of friends of my parent's.  They joined us for some of the ride.

 

We took our time getting to our destination, which would have taken about two hours had we gone the less scenic route.  We stopped for a great lunch, and then again at a Harley dealership. Harleys weren't the only thing they sold.

When we arrived at our "fake home" as Cortlan called it all weekend, we were slightly disappointed to find that we didn't have the adjoining rooms that we had asked for, but we did have rooms next to one another.  Regardless, the kids loved it. And of course, they gave us plenty to laugh about.  Like, when Cortlan was told to go to the bathroom in room A, but instead showed up in room B and John asked, "Why didn't you just go in the other room like I asked you to?"  Cortlan very seriously (but clearly not truthfully) said, "I don't know how to go to the bathroom over there."  To which Everly replied, "Wit your penis, Tort."  Um, yeah, Cort.  Duh.

After getting unpacked (and using the bathrooms), we went to get my race packet and were happy to see an awesome playground at the packet pick up area, which would also be the Start/Finish line area.

A small purchase from the running vendors later, and we went to check out the lake.

Perhaps the highlight for the kids, though, was pizza in the hotel room followed by their first indoor pool experience ever, where Cortlan swam for the first time without any flotation devices.

Can you tell he was proud after his first solo swim?

As the day came to a close, my thoughts went to the early wake up call I was going to be getting, and then immediately to the hotel experience that we had in June.  Fortunately, my parents stepped in and saved the day by offering to let the kids sleep in their room.  The story is that they finally were asleep at about 10:30.  I was dreaming sweet dreams by then.

And after a slightly rough night of sleep, the alarm went off at 5:10 AM...

Beach Rewind

Wow!  Only seven posts in July?  Yikes!  Can't believe August is here already.  So much happened in July that, well, I didn't even have time to write about it.  I guess a good place to begin would be vacation.  Here are some high(and low)lights:

The GPS told us that our trip should take about 10 hours.  We left at 11PM and got to Emerald Isle, NC at 12 PM the next day.  Yes, that is 13 hours.  Of that 13 hours, at least 45 minutes was spent in a McDonalds in a Wal-Mart because we forgot that Chick Fil A was closed on Sundays.  Why 45 minutes?  Well, the kids are unbelievably slow eaters and Everly fell off her chair and needed ice on her head.  (You should have seen the goose egg.  Yikes.)

Cortlan has now been to the beach three times and Everly, twice.  Kids change a lot in a year and it is nearly impossible to predict how they will like something that they haven't experienced in that length of time.  Will they be annoyed by the sand or love it?  Will they run into the waves or away from them?  Will they want to spend five minutes or five hours at the beach on a given day?  There was no telling until we got there.  I am happy to say that they loved the sand and the surf.  Everly enjoyed the waves so much that she was barrel rolling into them and staying under the water for longer-than-I-would-ever-expect amounts of time.  Cortlan had just as much fun (though without his face in quite as much).  They both enjoyed the boogie boards, and they both enjoyed digging in the sand and making sand castles.

Much of our time was spent on the beach due to the perfect weather, and just being in and by the water was really a fun time.  The water was great, and the sun was shining.  One night, we did go to the Pine Knoll Aquarium and really enjoyed that, as well.  It was pirate night.

Post-Mustache, Pre-Eye Patch

In the past, we have taken some of our best family pictures at the beach.  After embarrassing myself a little with an over the top obsession with trying to get my family to cooperate during even one single picture taking attempt, I realized this wasn't going to be the year for good pictures.  It took me until late in the week to give it up, so to my family and friends that were on the trip:  Sorry for my far too many stressful "smile and say cheese" moments.  But family:  next time, could you cooperate even a little?  I mean, had we gotten it right on one of the first several hundred attempts, I wouldn't have had to torture you with several hundred more.   Even though we didn't get quite what I had envisioned, I can't complain about the memories we captured.  

Our vacation (according to Cortlan, kind of)

Last year after vacation, I sat down with Cortlan and he wrote a cute story about our trip.  Well, it was kind of about our trip.  I thought that this year, I might try the same thing.  Needless to say, it didn't go quite as well.  But this is what Cort did have to say (in the short time that I could hold his attention) about our vacation to Emerald Isle, NC last week. (I am thinking that next time I should have him write the story much sooner after vacation.  Perhaps he will remember a bit more.):

Can we write a story about our vacation?  Lets start, "Last week, we went to the beach and..."

I played in the sand and digged and digged and digged a big hole with Wesley!  And I liked when I digged and digged a big hole with Wesley. 

Cool.  What else?  I surfboarded every day.  (Pause.) I didn't really surfboard everyday.  I was just kidding.  Good thing you wrote it down.

I don't really remember a lot more.

That's all that you remember??  I really liked the kites that I was flying. Can you tell me more about that?  No, I really don't remember anymore.

Do you remember being a pirate?  Yes.  Tell me about you being a pirate.  I had to find treasure chests and I don't remember what else I had to find.  I don't think there was anything else.  Uh huh!  I saw fishies and the fishies hiding treasure.  And I was a seahorse.  I was floating underwater. Haha that's funny.  Mommy, when I said I was a seahorse floating underwater, I wasn't really one. 

That's all I want to say.

And that is where it ended.  So much for that idea.  Maybe I will try again sometime, but for now, this will do as Cortlan's version of vacation.  I wonder what Everly would have to add...

Where the air is sweet

Last week, we went on a three night trip to a great water and theme park with familiar and colorful characters.  This was a trip with many firsts: the first time the four of us have stayed at a hotel together, the first time that we attempted daytime travel (as opposed to driving all night, which is great from the kids sleeping perspective, but not so great from the adults not sleeping perspective), the first time the kids went to a water park, the first time we attempted to make it through the day with no nap, and the list goes on.  On the six hour drive home, my mind wandered to a billion blog posts I could write about the trip, none of which could really do the memories justice.  I thought I had a pretty decent idea as to how the trip would go.  But if there is anything I should know by now, as a parent, there is no predicting.

In preparation for the trip, I was sure to pack a selection of healthy snacks, and plenty of things to keep the kids occupied while in the car.  I even got a little crafty and cut felt into little people and clothes and shapes of all kinds so the kids could make their own scenes on their own personal felt boards.  This did prove to be a pretty big hit, if only for the novelty factor, but I did make one mistake - I didn't make two of everything.  Specifically, there was only one "boy" hair and one "girl" hair.  Of course, the girl hair was way cooler and coveted by both.  What I didn't expect to happen on the drive:  our quick rest stop trip turning into over an hour (my kids may be the slowest eaters on earth), and missed naps.  Seriously.  What kid only sleeps for 45 minutes out of a six hour drive?  Mine, apparently.

We neared our destination just in time for the downpour to begin, but there was no way that we were not going into the park.  As the only people entering the park, pushing ourselves and our umbrellas against the sea of people leaving, we weren't even sure that the park was still open.  Sure enough, it was.  And sure enough, the rain stopped soon after, leaving us with a little sunshine and a nearly deserted park.  We were among the first in line for every ride, and got prime seats at the show that evening.  Cortlan rode his first roller coaster.  Everly began her love affair with the swings.

Arriving at the hotel much later than typical bedtime, I was sure that the kids would fall asleep, exhausted, shortly after their heads hit the pillow.  Again, I should know better than to make such predictions.  After a bath and story, the giggle-fest began.  With the two kids in one bed and John and I in the other, the room sounded more like an adolescent slumber party than the dark, peaceful room filled with zzzzz's that I had imagined.  Whispers building up to full out hysterical laughter for who knows what reason had us all laughing.  Then it started to get pretty frustrating.  After around the sixth or seventh trip to their bed for one thing or another, we finally got the sound we were waiting for - quiet.  It was 10:00.  The next night went marginally better.  The trick:  John went to the lobby or exercise area, I put Everly in one bed, Cort in the other, lied and told them I had to go potty, took my book to the bathroom, and waited them out.  They are used to falling asleep by themselves; the more people in the room, the longer the process seemed to take.  With this solution, I at least got to read part of my book, and the process did go a bit faster.

With the exception of a minor head injury (me), some puking (Ev), and some minor meltdowns due to lack of sleep (Cort and Ev), the rest of the trip went off without a hitch.  We had a great time.  Of course, Cortlan would have probably been happy if he could have sat on the forklift or firetruck for most of the day, and Everly would have been content to go back and forth between the swings and the carousal, but at least some of us managed to ride just about everything there.  Cort loved the rope climbing, hated the water slides.  Everly wanted to go on everything - the bigger the better.  (She even went on the Blast Off ride that shoots you up and drops you down.)  They both loved the spraying water attractions, the parade, seeing all of the characters and shows, the slides, and of course, the ridiculously huge lollipops that we splurged on, knowing there would be no way they could finish them.

John and I loved seeing them so happy.

Vacation, According to Cortlan

So we left Surf City, NC (which is on Topsail Island) last night at about 8:30, drove through the night with several stops, and arrived home early this morning.  There is much that I could write regarding vacation, which, despite some screaming by Everly and a few minor discipline issues with Cortlan, was a really awesome trip.  But, I thought that it might be interesting to hear Cortlan tell the tale of vacation, and so I sat him on my lap, where he dictated and I typed. Getting a story out of him was a lot more difficult than I anticipated, but I pushed through, thinking that he would ultimately tell the stories of him and his buddy playing in the loft of the beach (town)house and inviting us to a party in their bedroom, us making sand castles and collecting seashells, him spending hours swimming in the ocean, him seeing a big crab walking sideways on the beach.  This is what I got, with my interpretations bracketed:

Cortlan, will you tell me a story about vacation?  We can start it "Once Upon a Time..."
There was a... I smelled some horse poop. 
[So this is the first thing he remembers.  Nice.  There was one point on the last day at the beach that he said he smelled something like poop when we were outside.  It was a two second conversation.]
Wait, you want to tell the story about your vacation, right? 
Uh huh.  The phone was ringing at the beach house where the sand is and the waves.  Everyone had their phone but not us.  Everyone had their phone at the beach.  We had our phone at the beach.  But not where the sand was. 
[Huh?  Maybe he was thinking about them playing with the phones in the bedrooms of the beach house.  They actually plugged into the walls, which was some novelty to them, I think, since they are used to cell phones and cordless ones.  But we rarely heard a phone ring the entire week.  And definitely not at the beach.]
Ok, what else do you want to tell about vacation? 
We made a big hole and me and Wesley got covered up and we made... um... um... it was like a tower and it was like a zoomer that we zoomed down. We just did our hands to zoom down it.  [With some help, they made a huge mound of sand, which they preceded to slide down on their bellies.  Those swimming suits may never be the same again.]
And we made some pork chops. 
We didn't have pork chops at the beach. 
We had pork chops but didn't have pork chops.  We just made a pork chop in the sand.
Oh.  [No, we didn't.  But we did have pork chops for dinner tonight.]
And we had to go to the store but there was nothing at the store.  It was closed.  We were still at the beach but we were at the store.  It was a little bit far away.
[I have no idea about this one.  Though, through the entire trip, he struggled with the term "being at the beach."  We were at the beach in the general sense through the entire trip, but at times we were actually at the beach where the sand and water were.  He thought about that very carefully.]
What else do you want to say? 
Um.  Nothing. 
What about swimming in the ocean and things like that?  Tell me something else about the fun things that you did at the beach!
Um... I am going to tell you about the quads.  Ok, Mommy? 
Ok. Tell me about the quads! 
They have special kind of wheels that they can actually drive in the sand and the mud and they had to go in the water to get the sand off of it.  They were driving around.  We didn't know the people that were driving it.  They went past another quad.  I ripped the waves and Wesley did, too.  I just showed him how to.  When the waves comed, I told Wesley to rip the wave. 
[We saw two quads with beach patrol guys riding down the beach one day.  I wasn't aware of the "ripping" of the waves, but apparently John was there for that one.] 
What does it mean to rip a wave? 
Um. I saw some seashells that we could take home. 
Ok. What does it mean to rip a wave?
Um. To go underwater. To go under a wave!  Can you ride a wave? 
[At the beginning of the week, Cortlan only wanted to play in the sand. By the end of the week, I couldn't believe how much he loved the water.  There was a sand bar that allowed the water to pool a little bit and created an area that had only very small and calm waves for the kids to play in.  He got to the point where he was pulling himself through the water with his hands on the ocean floor and his legs dragging behind him and was going underwater, which he rarely even does in a swimming pool.  So in his head, he was probably ripping the wave.  If that is actually what that means.  Because I didn't know until he just told me.]
Can YOU ride a wave? 
Haha! No!  Can Daddy? Daddy, can you ride a wave??  Mommy, I am all done with my story. 
You don't want to write anything else?
Um. No. 
You don't want to tell about the turtles?  Nothing?
No.  I don't .  Yes, I do!  Yes, I do! 
Ok.  So tell me! 
Once upon a time, there was a big turtle that was huge and Mommy wasn't that big!  The turtle was an inch big! The turtles hurted people, so a forklift had to get they up. 
[We went to the turtle rehabilitation hospital on the island, where we saw a turtle that weighed more than me (as pointed out to him by his father).  As for the forklift, I don't know.  But he had one in his hand during this story telling.]
Wait.  The turtles didn't hurt people, the turtles we saw were hurt. 
Why were they?  Did some get hit by a boat? 
Yeah. 
Why did some get hit by a boat?  How did some of they get hit by a boat? 
It was an accident. 
How did they?  How did they?  How did they, Mommy? 
It was an accident. 
How did they, though? 
The propeller hit them. 
Why did the propeller hit them? 
The boaters didn't know they were in the water.  So what did we see when we went to the turtle hospital? 
We saw the black thingy? Why did they have the black thingy on them? 
What black things? 
The things that were on their, um, the black things that were on them. 
The black things on their shells?  What were they for? 
I don't know what they were for. 
Were they holding their shells together? 
Yeah.  Why were they holding their shells together? 
Because they were broken and they were trying to heal so they could be released back into the ocean.  What else did we see there?  What was it like? 
I'm going to tell you something different.  A forklift needed to pick they up.
Ok.
It smelled stinky in there.  Mommy, did it smell stinky in there? 
Um.  A little bit. 
Why did it a little bit smell stinky in there?  Did some of the turtles smell stinky? 
Some did, I think.  It was hot, too.  So, how does this story end? 
You say stuff.
What is the last thing that you want to say in our story? 
There was some frogs. 
There were some frogs? 
Yeah.  That's the end of our story.
But we didn't see any frogs at the beach. 
But that's the end of our story. 
Ok.  That's the end of our story. 
The End.