Believe it or not, I will be seeing kids in the ER for sunburns not too long from now. It doesn't seem possible. In fact yesterday, when it was in the forties outside and each and every seedling that I had painstakingly nurtured was looking incredibly determined to die and those that were somehow surviving were getting dug out of the ground by my idiot dog, I thought I couldn't take it for another minute.
It has been a long winter. Everyone feels that way. Add to that the overwhelming number of wheezers and bronchiolitics and kids who did not get their flu shot and so subsequently got (you guessed it) the flu who stampede the ERs during these colder months and you can understand why I am a little bit desperate for a small taste of sun. Smart people, organized people, plan vacations to warm holiday destinations in order to avoid this feeling of misery around mid-March. I understand this. So I know it was my fault, two months ago, when I began to be a little on edge. I pushed through. But now, seeing as how it is freaking May already, I am overdue for a thaw.
Thus my overwhelming happiness when today was blissfully sunny and actually as warm as it looked from the windows of my frigid house. And away we went. I remembered vaguely that there was an ocean somewhere nearby, so it seemed only reasonable that we go reacquaint ourselves with its shores.
Emmaline, ever the avid ornithologist, took great pleasure in chasing seagulls this way and that, yelling "tweet, tweet, tweet, touch!" in her very best outdoor voice. They were, understandably, not terribly interested in cultivating interspecies communication and kept a safe distance away.
We didn't stay long, but it was enough. Em, buffeted by the winds and rebuffed by her fine feathered friends, was soon ready to move on. Trudging back through the deep, dry sand with her in my arms, I wondered if there was ever anything that smelled as sweet as a bald baby head doused in sunscreen and coated in a fine layer of sand. You can see how delirious I have become.
Hopefully we will have many beach days ahead. Ones where Em is actually allowed to stick her feet in the water and splash, splash, splash since that is arguable her favorite thing on this earth. Apart from seagulls, that is.
jealous! i miss the beach and the ocean. but on the positive side, joey did get a sunburn in chicago in april. apparently he's fairer than i remembered. i won't forget again :-)
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