Category Archives: Vacation

Getting My Mojo Back

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Since August of last year, I feel like I’ve lost my mojo. My writing mojo.

You know, the FUNNAY.

I’ve read and reread blog posts from DG and CDL (the blog I never update) and, well, I used to be funny. I loved what I read. These days? I kinda feel like I”m going through the motions. Like I’m just doing it to do it. Not because I enjoy it.

I wanna get my mojo back.

I know, I know. Roller Coaster Ride. Up and down, etc, etc. The past eight months have been one major stressful event after another. I could barely breathe, I was so weary. And that’s what this weekend was all about.

Getting me back. And getting us back. The Guy I Live With and Me.

I think we accomplished it. I came home well-rested, relaxed and calm. I had massages scheduled THE SECOND we got to our secret beach location. I mean, the second we got there. Checked in to our spa B&B, went to our room, COUPLES MASSAGE!  WOOO! Then we sat in the hottub. OH YES WE DID.

The Guy I Live With and I had a nice, calm, relaxing four days out of town. We ate and slept ourselves silly, of course, which is exactly what we set out to do. We got to have ACTUAL UNINTERRUPTED CONVERSATIONS. I know, right?  Truly amazing.

We visited things we couldn’t visit with the kids. Like lighthouses with 191 steps!  And took a little cruise on a catamaran. And the captain called me ORANGE HAIR.

We had nice dinners and pleasant walks on the beach.  It wasn’t terribly crowded so it was nice and peaceful. And quiet and stuff. You know, except for the FIGHTER JETS going overhead. All hours of the day and night. I sh*t you not. Turns out the Naval Air Base? Half mile from our B&B! WOOO! GO US!  We picked a town with constant jet noise!

The third day we headed inland. Three inches of rain expected (and we sure did get it) we were thinking the beach was gonna be a drag. For some reason. Anywho, we went to Colonial Williamsburg and had a blast. Six hours of trudging around in the pouring, fifty-degree deluge. And right at the end, walking back to the shuttle to get our car? The umbrella broke. As the heavens opened up and dumped on us more. By the time we got back to the Visitors’ Center we were absofmurfly drenched. But fear not, as we dried off and perused the gift shop (because coming home without something for Bug Boy is akin to torture) we were treated to a dulcimer demonstration. It was lovely to shop for plastic Revolutionary Army men and books about the revolution while listening to sounds of…

OH NO HE DI’INT.

Yep. Canon in D. There is just no escape. And you know what? It’s always when I’m already in a pissy mood and soaked to my underpants from walking around in a downpour in fifty-degree weather. Funny how that works.

I took a HOT bath in this bad boy right here!

We checked into our B&B that night (new one), dried off (I took a bath in the awesome soaking tub in our room. IN OUR ROOM. Right in the middle of it!), hit an art museum and then went out to dinner. Again! CONVERSATIONS. I mean, can you believe this? We’re gonna get spoiled with this adult-interaction-without-interference stuffs.

Dinner. At a college pub. We’re all fancy-like.

I ordered a kick-arse hard cider. And let’s just say the Waiter made up for the flood when he ASKED FOR MY ID. OH YES HE DID, PEOPLE. And! There’s more! He said I didn’t look a day over 25!  Which means he was smoking crack or needed glasses or fishing for a giant tip but hey!  It’s the thought that counts right?

I can’t make this shiz up.

Anywho. We arrived safely home Monday, the boys were happy to see us (well, Bugaboo ignored me for a few hours but then he came around) and we’re settling back into our routines, slowly but surely. And I do feel better.

Much better.

Like, two months ago? Let’s just say I wasn’t in a very healthy place emotionally or mentally. Constant sleep deprivation will do that to you. But now? I feel relieved. Less weary. Happier. Calmer. Ready to face it all.

I love how just a few hours of peace can recharge my batteries.

Imagine what a week could do (AS IF)!

And while I’m still not feeling FUNNAY or like I’ve totally got my Mojo?

At least I’m not putting my underwear on backwards and shirts on inside out and going out in public. This time. Not like I’ve done that or anything. OK FINE, I TOTALLY HAVE.

 

 

 

Getting Caught Up

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So!  After yesterday’s word vomit fest, I thought I’d get you caught up on what’s happening in my life.

First, there was THE WEEKEND. The Annual Eat and Sleep Weekend. It was glorious. But you know that.

We visited an arboretum. There was a stone thing. It was like someone knocked down Stonehenge. It was a sundial, and a pretty nifty one:

Stonehenge. Sort of.

How lucky are we to be driving around doing nothing and find a JEEP OFF ROAD EVENT?  And they had dozens of awesome jeeps. I miss my jeep. You can read about that here. In the meanwhile, COME TO MOMMA:

I love you and I just met you.

We drove to Pittsburgh for the day from State College. Just because. It’s pretty there:

Such a nice little town. If you squint you can see the bajillion people going to the football game.

Then, we came home on The Guy I Live With’s Birthday. And he bought me a car. For his birthday:

He bought me a pretty thing for my birthday. It's like driving the space shuttle. So many buttons, so little time (and I totally killed the battery playing with the buttons before we even finished signing the paperwork and they had to jump my battery. AWKWARD).

The Guy I Live With totally didn’t want to have a party or anything so I had to cancel what little I had planned and pretend he TOTALLY WASN’T TURNING FORTY and TELL NO ONE. And…dammit. Screw it. We had pie. And since I had the wrong number candles, it looked like this:

60-20 is forty, for those of you not good at math. Shaddup, I didn't have a FOUR candle.

And I managed to get a picture of 3/4ths of DG’s family. For the fourtieth birthday that totally wasn’t happening:

Best picture I've gotten in a few years. No really.

Not a bad couple of days, huh?

 

 

 

 

We Made it Through the Wilderness. Somehow We Made it Through (Or, Yes, I’m Still Talking About my vacay)

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See, it was such a momentous occasion that I just can’t stop talking or thinking about it. I actually got SLEEP on this one and felt slightly refreshed when we got home. So I am going to talk about it until I am blue in the face, mmkay?

Sand Castles. At the OLD lake.

I’ve decided to give you the top ten highlights, because I’m awesome like that.  Without further ado:

  1. Imagine being about five minutes down the road from your house and hearing an alarm. Like, an air raid type sound. It turns out that The Guy I Live With had given Bug Boy the GPS (because my phone has one, so we used it) and Bug Boy set an alarm to warn us if Hubs was going over 65. See, rule boy has to make sure everyone follows the rules.
  2. Bugaboo sang falsetto for the entire three-hour ride to our cabin. ENTIRE RIDE.  All of his favorites, too! Hot Cross Buns, Star Wars Imperial March, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star..in falsetto. AND! Remember, he doesn’t speak! So it’s all gibberish, too! Best part? When Bug Boy said, “THAT IS SO ANNOYING. MOM. THAT IS SO ANNOYING.” About thirty times because repeating the same sentence over and over in an hour’s time certainly isn’t annoying.
  3. All that trouble we went through to get Bugaboo that fancy schmancy five-point harness? Wiggled out of it five times on the way up. So glad we went through all that trouble.
  4. It’s a small town near the cabin. Like, a small, farming, predominately Mennonite and Amish town. It’s nothing to see gaggles of barefoot children in a dollar store or at a minimart. or sitting on laps on a wagon, trotting down the street. No car seats there. Sometimes, there are like eight kids squeezed into one of those little buggies. Amazing.
  5. Everywhere we went, Bug Boy gave a countdown for how many miles until we got to our destination, because apparently we hadn’t learned out lesson giving him the GPS on the way TO the camp. He gave the updates every two or three miles. This was only slightly less annoying then the alarm for going ONE MILE over the speed limit.
  6. We saw many, many R.O.U.S. Many. I kept my eyes out for fire and quicksand. We made it.
  7. We went out to dinner a lot because it was my vacation, too, and I don’t cook. They get cereal for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch and that’s it. One night, it was the Barrel of Cracker and Bugaboo suddenly reached over to me, took my hand and put it on his tooth. It appears it was loose and he wanted me to yank it out. I refused to do this at the table, of course, so he snapped it out himself and handed it to me, blood pouring down his face…just as the food arrived. So classy. Then we lost the tooth. BTW, the previous two teeth he lost? We have no idea what happened to them. POOF. Disappeared.
  8. One day we got this bright idea to drive to this quaint, beautiful little town about an hour north of the camp. We loaded the kids and dogs in, thinking we’d take them to this BEAUTIFUL park there, which even had old train cars for the kid to check out. So we get there, after getting stuck in traffic (in the middle of freaking no where) and Daisy puking multiple times (more on that later) and Bugaboo wetting his pants and pulled up to the park only to see many, many, many signs saying, “NO DOGS ALLOWED.”  Crap.
  9. Speaking of puking, Daisy pukes in the car a lot. Like on the way to quaint little dog-unfriendly town, she puke on Bug Boy’s variety puzzle book. Now, you can buy one of these EVERY MONTH at discount department stores, mmkay? She puked right on the cover of his 225 Variety Puzzle book. That night I went to the store and got him a 253 Variety Puzzle book because I figured 253 is better than 225, right? Nope.Heard about it for the rest of the trip. He sighed and said, “It’s just not the same, mom.” Right. BECAUSE IT HAS MORE PUZZLES. THIS IS BETTER.
  10. There’s nothing like being in the middle of this teeny town of maybe 600 people and having a cell signal. Or being in a tiny buffet restaurant in the middle of nowhere and hearing thumping bass. Remember, most of the people who live here? AMISH AND MENNONITE. I am pretty sure it wasn’t coming from them. Just a hunch.
  11. I lied. There are eleven because this blog ALWAYS goes to eleven.  Anyways, remember the dog puking? Well, between that and Bugaboo peeing the bed a few times (and not when he was asleep, he’d just go in there and pee on his bed. Thank goodness for mattress covers) I had to do laundry. So four days in a row we’d go over the mountain to the laundromat and through laundry in. Four days in a row I forgot the detergent we keep at the camp. Four days in a row we’d drive back to the camp without the laundry and have to turn around to get it.

We get to see pretty things like this on vacation

I’m done talking about my vacation. Promise. Maybe. I tend to lie a lot, after all.

When the Cat’s Away, the Mice Leave the Refrigerator Door Open

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We’ve actually been back from vacation since Friday but there’s this thing called a mountain of laundry and unpacking to do. Then there’s the fact that the entire time we were away (a week. That’s seven days for those of you not good at math) our refrigerator was left open a tiny portion of a crack and it heated up and the AC was turned to 82 and the house was humid and…basically we came home to rotted food and mold and slime and YES, I AM PISSED I HAD TO THROW AWAY ALL MY FOOD, why do you ask?

Daily walks. Notice no stroller! Bugaboo now walks without running away! HOLLA!

The good news is we all survived, we all managed to relax and it was absosmurfly the best thing for all of us. A little change of scenery can be a very good thing. Well, unless you’re Bugaboo and you want to go to the same lake every single day and so your family takes you to the same lake every day on vacation except the last day when they thought they’d surprise you and your brother and pack a picnic lunch and drive to a slightly different lake about five miles up the road. In that case, a change of scenery is WTF WERE YOU THINKING because five minutes of shrieking and screaming and throwing sand at people and your parents toss everything back in the car and go back to the ORIGINAL lake. This is about the time we learned CHANGE IS BAD, MMKAY? You’d think we’d know this by now. Sheesh.

The reason I was admonished by several ladies at the lake each day. Because I "allow" him to drink lake water. Uh huh.

Original Lake. Not to be confused with New Lake. NEW IS BAD.

We were doubly, triply and quadruply blessed with awesome weather, which is good, since a cabin in the woods in the mountains of PA is humid and damp and gross every day of the year. Cooler weather makes it more tolerable, see. While The City of Brotherly Love was suffering through yet another week with the Three-Aitches (hazy, hot and humid) with crappy air quality, we had perfect weather, 82 degrees, cloudy for most of it. Bugaboo swam for hours at a time, Bug Boy went fishing and spent hours stalking the crayfish by the rocks. Daddy and Mommy actually got to relax in the shade each day, Daddy catching zzzz’s and Mommy doing crosswords and word puzzles. Even the doggies got to go swimming. Well, Bristol (our lab) went swimming because labs have this natural ability to swim. Crazy Daisy (our border collie) acted like a cat going into bath water.

Bug Boy's first ever-caught fish. It's about the size of a large minnow.

Every day brought a walk on the gravel road and a drive on a country road to see the sights. We took deep breaths of the mountain fresh air (ahhh, that evergreen smell) and fell asleep each night listening to crickets and whippoorwills and cicadas (dang, those birds are LOUD, yo).

No pictures, no comments!

Basically, it was a week of heaven on earth.

Our view each and every day. I can still smell the evergreens.

It’s amazing what a little R&R will do for the soul, you know? For all of us. In fact, it makes mommies more prepared when little boys eat things they shouldn’t and stay up all night the night before they go back to school puking up the insides of their intestines, see. And makes mommies not so cranky when they get about an hour of sleep and spend the entire day cleaning up from the twelve-hour puke fest.  Just sayin’. Not that it happened here or anything (it totally did. That little turkey.)

And it also helps a girl not sob so much when she realizes she lost about $200 of food when she leaves the fridge open when she goes on vacation.

 

Going on a Little Holiday

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It’s that time of year!  Looking forward to heading out-of-town with the family. You know, there’s nothing like taking a child who escapes constantly to a tiny cabin in the woods with abso-smurfly no babyproofing (or Bugaboo proofing).  Did I mention it’s in the middle of nowhere? In a tiny cabin in the woods? WE ARE TAKING HIM TO A CABIN IN THE WOODS.  Yes, we are insane.

The good news is he usually behaves when we’re there. Except for the one time when it was pouring rain and we couldn’t go walking because of the thunder-storm and the flood on the road and we were stuck in the tiny, two-room cabin and he screamed bloody murder and we left a few days early. Then there was the time that he fell off the screened-in porch (right through the screen)of the cabin (which is on a hill that slopes down) and there was an eight foot drop and he kinda got hurt.  Yep. Good times.

It’s supposed to be dang hot up there, just like the rest of the northeast. Like, 102 degrees with a 110 heat index. And it’s always about 100% humidity up there because IT IS IN THE WOODS AND FORESTS ARE HUMID. There’s your science lesson for the day!  And yet, we purposely seek out this place. On purpose. And we love it there. Why?

No phone.

No television. No cable.

No Internet access.

No distractions.

Just us, the family, trying to kill each other enjoying each other and having a good time. We go to the lake. We walk on the gravel road (dirt road, if you live in PA). We catch bugs. We take them fishing and swimming. We go to nature preserves, go on drives to see bear and deer. We get ice cream. We eat too much. We sleep tons. We do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it.  It’s a little slice of heaven. And just what we need right now.

See you in a few days, my friends. Something tells me I will have stories to tell.

 

The Week That Was

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Hello, Internets. It’s me.   Sorry to be so neglectful, but we’ve had a busy week at Chez DG.  Bugaboo was on break from school (always a laugh riot), The Husband was off from work for a week and there was a vacation to be had.  We ate way too much, prolly drank way too much and enjoyed ourselves (and each other quite a bit).  It was the best family vacation by far. Ever.

We played.

And ate.

And laughed.

And walked.

And talked.

BYE BYE MAMA!

And enjoyed.

A Bug Boy and his dog

And!  And!  Bugaboo did a few neat things.  First of all, he didn’t run away ONCE while we stayed at our family cabin in Rural Central PA.  This is always a good thing.

He also learned to eat with a fork.

And he rode in the Fourth of July parade for the first time.

Big Wheels Keep on Turning

First Prize!

He slept through EVERY SINGLE NIGHT.  And he went on his first water slide ever. And wanted to keep going on it.

Bug Boy passed the deep water test at the pool. I got to read a book for the first time in a million years (not really, but it sure seems like it).  The husband has been in an awesome mood.

We also finally got furniture to enjoy our new patio.

And a trampoline for Bugaboo (INSTANT PHYSICAL THERAPY FTW!).

Basically, it was the best week of vacation we’ve ever had with Bugaboo.  No major issues.  No majorregression.  No calling the cops to find lost children. No viruses, no ear infections, no poison ivy.  No sick dogs.  No house catastrophes. Just rest and relaxation, enjoying our time with family and friends.

I could get used to it.

The Suckiest Sucky Spring Break That Ever Sucked

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I shouldn’t be so negative (because, like, it’s totally not me to be negative and pessimistic.  Could be because I’m all hormonal and stuff.) but it’s barely been four days of Spring Break and I already want to cry.

Drenching Rains and accompanying mud from dogs (one extra)?  Check.

Multiple children in my house during deluge?  Check.

Child who has dumped crap on the floor, escaped several times, tried to jump out of the car and destroyed and broke sh*t? CHECK, CHECK, CHECK.  And that was just in the first two hours.

Let’s see.  How about we add in the fact that Bugaboo has wet the bed every night for a week?  Because he wakes up and instead of getting out of bed to go, he turns over to his stomach and pulls out his…ahem, little firehose and goes on the bed.  Or better yet, he climbed into MY BED after wetting HIS bed, and I changed him and he went back to sleep, only to wake up completely saturated from the waist down .  Which soaked through to the quilt, all sheets and the blanket on my bed.   And the pillows. Thank heaven for waterproof bed pads, eh?

By the end of the week I will be weary.  I’ll be exhausted (no naps) and run ragged. There will be piles of laundry and dishes to do. And piles of laundry and dishes to put away.  And dishes and laundry. Did I mention the laundry?  This girl is totally buying paper plates. My family can tell you I am ANTI PAPER PRODUCTS but this week I suddenly realized the reason people use them.  To preserve what’s left of their sanity!

Wanna know what’s even better?  Bug Boy’s violin lessons.  He’s actually doing quite well. He likes to practice and he wants me sitting next to him to listen to every screechy, nails-on-a-chalkboard note.  And I don’t mind it. Except for the part where he learned HOT CROSS BUNS.  If you ever took a music lesson you know what I mean.  It’s the same three notes. Over and over. And over.  AND OVER AND OVER.  It’s repetitive!  But even better?  Bugaboo has learned to hum it.  Bugaboo. My child who doesn’t talk?  Non-verbal Bugaboo?  He’s apparently a music savant.  He has incredible musical memory. He’ll hear something from WEEKS ago (like a theme song from a tv show he’s heard only once) or months ago (Christmas music) and we’ll be walking around, say, Tarzhay?  And he’ll begin humming?  And my husband and I look at each other and say, “Is he humming…naaahhhh.”  and we continue to shop and we hear it again.  And then again.  And then for the next two days. If you know anything about Autistic kids you know that sometimes they have this phenomenon called Echolalia? Which is fancy-schmancy talk for, “THE KID WON’T STOP SAYING IT FOR HOURS.”  (Which we kinda suspected, since once he said, “SH*T” for two hours after I dropped a whole chicken and my dogs got it. ) Well, we’re lucky enough to have, “The Kid Who Hums the Same Song for Days.”  Not too annoying.  Just sayin’.  This will all be fine, of course, if he’s one of those kids that sits down at the piano at the age of nine and suddenly plays Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. He already hums The Magic Flute, so this isn’t entirely far-fetched.  They can make a movie out of it.  My only request is that some really hot redheaded chick plays me (like Amy Adams.  Or Christina Hendricks. Because she has awesome…eyes.).