Camping with the Flamingos: Day 1

Casey had two days off school at the end of last week for parent-teacher conference days, so we decided to go camping. Before Thursday, the Airstream had not moved for over a year for various reasons, the main one being that for several months our weekends were completely consumed by leading music in a Saturday night worship service. Nowadays, however, Flamingo Joe plays drums at a church across town a couple of Sundays a weeks and the rest of us sit quietly in church and try to behave (it’s not easy). So it was high time the Airstream hit the road for adventure.

It was my job to find a suitable campground and though that may sound easy, the person we’re really trying to please here is Joe. Flamingo Joe looks down his nose on campgrounds in general because they are, as he says, “Ridiculous.” He believes that if you are going camping, you should be dropped off along the edge of a wilderness somewhere with your backpack, a bedroll and a snakebite kit and arrange for someone to meet you on the other side of said wilderness a week later. Campgrounds where people pull in their $35,000 -- $150,000 campers and park right up next to some other people and their campers is not his idea of roughing it and I really don’t think he sees the point, which is, of course, forcing parents to spend time with their children where SpongeBob and his silly square pants cannot intrude.

So when looking for a campground I try to select one that is 1) actually in the woods and 2) has more wildlife than our own property. That usually means we camp in state parks.

I started my search for the perfect campground on the Florida State Parks website and was really looking for somewhere only a couple of hours away that maybe had a spring or something else interesting we’d never seen or experienced before. I had decided on Blue Spring State Park, which is over on the St. Johns River, and looked to be 2-3 hours away, but I didn’t make reservations because Flamingo Joe often changes his mind about how far/where/if we’re going at all the day before we leave and since we were going on a Thursday, I thought we’d be certain to get one of the “walk-up” sites even if we drove over without a reservation. Sure enough, on Wednesday, I told Joe where I thought we should go and he said, “Isn’t there anything closer?”

So on Thursday morning (it was really more like noon by the time we had everything packed up and ready), we drove all the way across town to Hillsborough River State Park. It took us 35 minutes to get there. I didn’t think we’d have trouble getting a space because when I checked availability on Wednesday night it looked like there were plenty of spaces available. By the time we got there on Thursday, however, the park had filled up, reservations-wise, for the weekend beginning with Friday night. If we couldn’t get a space for the second night, we would basically have a 24 hour camping trip. And it would be my fault.

So I had to plead with the park ranger and stand there at the counter and humbly acknowledge that yes, I was indeed familiar with the Reserve America site (where I should have actually made reservations), but that I didn’t make reservations because we had decided to come to this state park instead of Blue Spring rather at the last minute. Lucky for me, there is apparently a bit of healthy competition among the various state parks in Florida and when the ranger heard that we’d opted for her park instead of Blue Spring, she found a spot for us that we could occupy for two nights instead of just one, but she made me promise that we would definitely leave on Saturday. “Yes ma’am,” I said, “we will definitely leave on Saturday.”

When I reported to the group that we’d gotten a spot for two nights, I’m pretty sure I heard Flamingo Joe grumble, “We wouldn’t need reservations if we were really camping” as he walked back to the car.

We invited Dez to come along with us on this trip, and 5 people in the camper was going to be a little cramped, so Joe also brought the tent that we bought 5 or 6 years ago, but had never actually used on a camping trip. In fact, prior to this trip, it had been set up exactly twice: 1) for a sleepover in the backyard with the Yak Yaks and their kids; and 2) when a former co-worker of mine took it to Key West and set it up for all of ten minutes before the rest of his group made him take it down because it was so big it took up all the available space on their reserved site.

It’s actually a pretty easy tent to set up, especially since the directions were still in the bag and also because Flamingo Joe was doing all the assembly:



We (i.e., Joe) had the tent up in less than half an hour.



Though it may look like Dez is reading the directions and helping with the tent there, she’s actually reading through the campground rules, two of which Flamingo Joe has already violated -- we’d been on the site for all of 45 minutes. He tied one of the tent’s ropes to a tree, violation of rule number 3, and he put up a tent larger than a “pup” tent on a site that also had a trailer on it. That was violating rule number 5, I think. When informed of these violations, Flamingo Joe muttered, “If we were really camping, we could tie whatever we wanted to trees” as he removed the rope from the tree and staked it to the ground instead. The tent however, stayed up for the duration of our stay and we weren’t cited by the rangers for our violation.

After setting up camp, I asked the kids if they wanted to go for a hike on the Rapids Trail and they both jumped all over the idea. The Rapids Trail started about a half of a mile back up the road, so we piled in the car to drive there and Casey and Mace started talking about what we were going to see on the trail. Casey was excited in general just to be done waiting to do stuff and was wondering how big the rapids would be, but Mace seemed really really excited about hiking the trail. Seeing as how he ends up getting carried for 70% of most of our hikes, I wasn’t sure why he was so excited until we were pulling into the parking lot and he said,

“I wan’ to touch ‘dem.”

“You want to touch the rapids?”

“Yesh.”

“Baby, we won’t be able to touch the rapids, we’ll have to stay on the bank.”

“But I wan’ to touch da bunny rapids!”

Ohhhhh. Yeah, he was a little disappointed there were no bunny rabbits at the rapids.



There were only some Class 2 rapids, which in Florida is apparently noteworthy:



We hiked along the river on the trail for a while and saw quite a bit of wildlife:



Nice bird, though a bit blurry. How about another try:



Hmmm . . still pretty blurry. I took four pictures of that bird and walked a little further down the trail to shoot another picture before I noticed that I’d actually been taking a picture of this little fellow, too:



He is in all of the pictures I have of that bird. Dez said there was some metaphor for the Christian life contained within that picture, but whatever it is, she’ll have to work it out on her own blog.

The alligator hiding in that picture was the first we saw on our hike, but not the last and definitely not the biggest:



There are two in that picture – the one up on the bank in the sun was at least ten feet long and looked full. The state park people will tell you that there has never been an alligator attack on a human within the park boundaries since the park opened, but those gators are eating something bigger than turtles and that’s all I’m saying.

Our hike went well until Mace fell down, skinned his knee, and then insisted on being carried for the rest of the hike.



Poor Mace, it looks like he’s really suffering, doesn’t it? He seems fine up there, but the minute Joe put him on the ground he just moaned and cried and carried on like his leg was falling off.

So he rode in comfort all the way back to the car.



When we got back to the campsite, it was time to start supper. Our choices were to cook over a fire or fire up the propane stove in the camper. I was fine with either option, so Flamingo Joe made the decision to cook over the fire, I assume to hold on to some semblance of feeling that we were really camping out and not just staying at an outdoor hotel.



Flamingo Joe and his children love fire. By the second night, Dez also loved fire and was trying to burn everything that wasn’t currently being worn by someone. But the thing about cooking over a fire is . . . well . . . a fire is really really hot and you can’t control the temperature and if you’re not careful, you’ll burn your dinner. And we did, but not too badly that we couldn’t eat it.

After dinner, we made s’mores and then commenced negotiations over who would be sleeping in the tent. Joe wanted the boys to sleep out in the tent with him and I fully expected Mace to want to be with him, and Casey to want to sleep in the trailer with me. That’s just our family dynamic – Mace sticks to Joe, Casey sticks to me.

Especially when it’s dark and there are weird sounds in the woods.

But Casey surprised us and was eager and willing to sleep in the tent with dad. So Joe got the air mattresses into the tent with the sleeping bags and went in there with both boys.

Mace lasted half an hour.

Casey lasted about two hours.

By midnight, Flamingo Joe was all by himself in the tent and Dez and the boys and I were in the trailer. Casey brought his deflating air mattress with him and put it on the floor of the camper beside where Mace was sleeping on the table-turned-bed. I thought that would work well because I knew there was a strong possibility that Mace would fall off the table-turned-bed in the middle of the night and I figured if Casey’s air mattress, or Casey himself, was there to break his fall, it would alleviate the guilt I was already feeling for not having Mace sleep with me on the sofa-turned-bed where he surely would have kicked me in the head all night when he wasn’t elbowing me in the kidneys. At 1:30, Casey woke me up to tell me that his mattress was almost all the way deflated and that Mace was about to fall off the table-turned-bed. When I looked, Mace was bent over backwards with his head and torso touching the floor and his bottom and legs still on the bed like he was doing a very precise backbend dismount off the bed. About the time I got up to try to lift him back onto the bed, he completed the dismount, kicking me in the head in the process and falling on top of Casey.

Mace ended up in bed with me and Casey ended up on the table-bed.

Joe stayed in the tent until 5:30 a.m., when he got too cold and/or uncomfortable to sleep and went out to sit by the fire. I was glad to see that he was getting to enjoy an authentic camping experience. Being too cold and/or uncomfortable is exactly the reason I shun authentic camping experiences.

[Tune in tomorrow for Day 2 of Camping with the Flamingos]

Balancing out the Snake Karma

I returned home from dropping Mace off at preschool this morning and parked my car on the concrete pad by the steps. Campbell (the dog with the horrible name) ran up to the car, already soaking wet, apparently having already taken a dip in the creek. I hopped out, went inside, made some tea and heard Campbell start barking rather insistently. I figured he was beside (or in) the water barking at a turtle or frog he'd cornered, so I ignored him for a few minutes. When I headed downstairs to the office, I saw that Campbell was feverishly trying to squeeze himself underneath my car. Not more than 15 minutes earlier I had parked that car in that very spot and there was nothing strange on the concrete pad when I pulled in. But now, apparently, 15 short minutes later, something was under the car. If you are not shivering in anticipation, you haven't been reading this blog long enough.

So, keeping well back from the car, I knelt down and looked:



Hmm . . . snake. Being the incredibly brave woman that I am, I took the dog inside and called for Grandma. I told her to keep the dog inside because there was a snake under the car and she nearly ran to the door so she could come outside and see it for herself. Grandma and I have a history with snakes (sorry, I tried to find the link for that post, but after 30 minutes of re-reading some extremely silly blog posts I gave up). The last time we (and by "we" I mean Grandma) caught one, we killed it, only to find out later that it was a harmless corn snake and I felt awful. This snake, upon closer examination (with the camera's zoom lens -- said camera being extracted carefully from the car itself when I realized there was something to actually photograph), was much larger than that sweet little corn snake we killed in cold blood:



Wicked. However, having lived in this wild and untame outpost of suburban Tampa, Florida for the past 5 years, I have learned that if that snake was indeed a water moccasin (which is what we would expect it to be, being so near the water and given its dark coloring), the dog would already be swollen and twitching and in desparate need of $1800 anti-venom that I was not going to get for him (no Dave Ramsey envelope for anti-venom, sorry) because he would have been bitten on the nose while trying to get to the snake underneath the car. This snake was calmly biding his time until he could safely get away -- that is not a moccasin-like behavior.

I was just going to leave him there under the car until time to go back and get Mace at noon, in the hopes that he would just slither away, but Grandma threw out the challenge, "I wonder if he would leave if you moved the car?" So I ever-so-quietly got back into the car and backed it off the concrete pad.

And Grandma, as always, was right.

Going:



Going:



And gone:



He went straight back to the water where he belongs and I wasn't even tempted to kill him. I'm hoping this evens the score for me in snakeworld.

Blessings

Mace has been volunteering to pray before dinner for the last week. For a while now we've been trying to get the boys to participate in the dinner prayer but Casey, who is 7, resists mightily and will tell you it's everyone else's turn but his until he is threatened with losing dessert, and then he'll cave in and mumble an extremely resentful prayer. I'm pretty sure his resentful blessings are the reason I'm hungry again an hour after I eat dinner -- an improperly blessed meal never satisfies. Up until a week ago, we couldn't even get Mace to pray at all. He is 3, after all, and it's easier to just say the prayer yourself than to wait for a 3 year to pray when he doesn't want to pray.

But lately he's been volunteering to pray every night, even when we decide it is actually someone's elses turn. Last night, he volunteered once again and this is how it went:

Mace: "Deaw Jesus, t'ank you fwoh Daddy [Daddy always gets top billing in Mace's prayers.] T'ank you fwoh Gwan'ma. T'ank you fwo Ya-Ya and Pop-Pop. [looking up] Ya-Ya and Pop not here."

Grandma: "That's okay, you can still say thank you for them."

Mace: "Ok. T'ank you fwoh Casey. T'ank you fwoh . . . [burp] . . . I burped."

Grandma: "That's okay, just say 'Excuse me.'"

Mace: "Ok. Excwuse me, God. [Casey started giggling uncontrollably about here.] T'ank you fwo Mommy."

[long pause here. Mace has trouble wrapping his prayers up.]

Me: [whispering] "Thank you for this food."

Mace: "T'ank you fwo food."

[another long pause]

Me: [whispering] "Amen."

Mace: "The end."

Me: "No, 'Amen'."

Mace: "Amen."

Boating With The Flamingos

Last weekend, Flamingo Joe got the boat ready and decided we needed to actually take it out on the water. Not sure really where he's coming from, but I try to be supportive . . . and by supportive I mean not let it show on my face too much how little I want to go out in the boat. Don't misunderstand me . . . being on the boat is awesome, once it is in the water and someone is driving me around. But now that we don't actually live on the water and can't just lower the boat lift, hop in and take off, taking the boat out is a bit more of a chore -- for Joe mostly, but he does expect me to participate a little bit by 1) getting food, towels, and drinks ready; and 2) getting the children all excited about going, and by children, I mean Casey. But last week, Flamingo Joe had handled all of the food, towels and drinks part while my kids, Heidi's kids, my parents and I went back down to Largo Central Railroad (that's ABPA, though, and we'll get to it in another post, maybe).

So I got back with the kids at 2ish and all I had to do was change my clothes and the kids' clothes and convince Casey that going in the boat would be fun. This is how the conversation went:

Me: Casey, do you want to go in the boat?

Casey: Are you going?

Me: Yes.

Casey: I don't want to go. [Contrary to how that sounds, i.e., rude, Casey's preliminary question in regard to almost all outings is to ask me if I'm going because if I'm not going, his reply is often an automatic "no." In this case, he was just trying to lay a foundation.]

Me: Okay, you can stay home with Grandma.

Casey: Are you going to go fast or slow?

Me: You will think it's fast, but we'll really be going slow.

Casey: I'm only going to go if you promise that you will go slow.

Me: I promise we will go slow for us, but it may still seem fast for you. How about if I promise you can swim off the back of the boat?

Casey: Okay, but I want to go slow.

Casey, as you can see, is not a fan of the boat, which tends to lead to some family conflict while we're in the boat because Casey will be screaming, "NOOOOOO! NOT FAST! SLOW DOWN!" While Mace screams, "FASTER DADDY!!! FASTER!!"

Dez went with us and it was her job to hold Mace's hand because, although he has a need for speed, he appreciates the comfort of someone's hand while flying across the water.

Flamingo Joe is not a fan of slow. But he really wants Casey to like the boat, so he usually caters to Casey for a little while and keeps the speed down, but then tries to gradually increase the speed without Casey noticing. Casey is not easily fooled and has an uncanny sense of exactly how fast the boat is going at any given moment. This trip, he picked 15 mph as the threshold speed above which the world would come to an end, so whenever he felt we had exceeded the 15 mph mark, he would scream "FIFTEEN!! DAD!!! FIFTEEN!!"

I think Flamingo Joe was praying for patience in that photo.

We boated around for an hour and a half or so and then before heading back to the boat ramp, we anchored the boat in shallow water so the boys could swim. Mace jumped right in . . .

. . . but for some reason Casey, the boy who can now (thanks to swim team) swim 100 yards without really trying, was nervous about jumping in the water.

I'm not sure why he thought it was deep:

Cause it wasn't. He did eventually take the life jacket off.

So after the boys swam for 20 minutes or so, we decided to head back to the boat ramp, which was only about 100 yards or so from where we had anchored the boat. The boys piled back in, Flamingo Joe started the boat, put it in gear and the boat shut down. He started it again, put it in gear, and again the boat shut down. And so it went for five minutes until Flamingo Joe announced that we had gotten sand in the impeller. By this time, the high-pitched beeeeeeeeeep that signals that the engine is overheated was going full blast. Keep in mind that the only way to get sand in the impeller is to operate the boat when you're in water that is too shallow. So while the beeeeeeep was piercing our eardrums I heard Flamingo Joe say, "I should have pushed the boat into deeper water before trying to start it." I don't know about you, but that sounds like an admission of guilt to me and we can safely say that we were stuck and . . .

. . . it was all Joe's fault. [If you feel that I'm being too hard on Flamingo Joe, I have at least two other boating stories to tell you -- one that involves our running the bow of our rented sailboat into the broadside of a much larger, seventy-times-more-expensive sailboat and another one that involves our sailing our small sailing catamaran (like a Hobie cat) around the wrong, too-windy side of an island and not being able to get back, forcing us to walk, in our life jackets, to a country club, where the nice man who met us in the foyer let us use his phone to call a cab. So yes, I have some latent boating resentment toward my husband.]

Joe decided to let the engine cool a little and then try to make it to the boat ramp. We made it as far as a channel marker about 50 yards to the boat ramp before the beeeeeeeep started going off again. Joe made me tie the boat off on the marker and lifted the engine cover. We waited another 10 minutes while the engine cooled and Flamingo Joe ominously pronounced, "We're going to gun it to the ramp so hold on."

Poor Casey didn't even have time to react to the announcement before we were going waaaaay over the 15 mph threshold.

He started screaming at the top of his lungs, "STOP!!! STOP!!! TOOO FAST!!! FIFTEEN!!! FIFTEEN!!!"

And both Joe and I were screaming, "JUST SHUT UP CASEY!!!"

Not our finest parenting moment, I admit.

The beeeeeeep started about 10 yards from the boat ramp, so Joe slowed down and told me to get to the front of the boat so I could tie us off at a cleat as soon as we got close enough to the dock because the engine was about to die.

I was being a very good wife, not asking questions (like, "What's a CLEAT?"), only taking instructions, and moved to the front of the boat, grabbed the rope, and got ready to jump, when Flamingo Joe added:

"We're only going to have one chance at this . . ."

Um, I'm sorry -- I needed extra PRESSURE?

I'm happy to tell you that I successfully tied off the boat and we all made it home in one piece thanks to my heroic efforts (never mind that Flamingo Joe was the one who managed to actually get the boat up on to the boat trailer without the benefit of a running engine).

On the way home, Casey announced that he was staying home with Grandma next time.

Mace's Swimming Summer

Mace is 3. At the beginning of the summer, he was wearing one of these to swim:

Or one of these:

We live in Florida, so that means that he needs to learn to swim at a very young age. There's water everywhere in Florida, not the least scary of which is the unfenced, alligator-infested creek that borders our property and is a mere 10 steps from our back steps. So fine, proactive parent that I am (stop laughing), I signed Mace up for swim lessons in June:

And he did fine -- but not well enough to move up to the next class. I was a little disappointed -- I sort of expected him to just catch on and take off -- he wasn't afraid of the water at all (unlike his older brother, who screamed bloody murder throughout each of his swim lessons when he was Mace's age) and I have been completely under-parenting this child. I assumed that since he was getting absolutely no pressure from me to succeed that he would, naturally, succeed. So I won't say I took his failure to advance as a personal failure, but that's only because I know I'm not supposed to say I took his failure to advance as a personal failure.

Between Heidi's house and the Y pool, Mace has been in the water alot this summer. At least three or four times a week. Those of you up north may not think of the last weekend in September as "summer" but that's because your leaves are changing and you are pulling out the super-attractive corduroy pants right now -- it's still 92 degrees everyday here and probably will be until almost Thanksgiving, so we'll be swimming for a few more weeks. Last week at the Y pool, I made Mace take off his back floatie that he likes to use in the Y pool, and he started swimming underwater. He just took off. Yay Mace!

So today at Heidi's, apparently emboldened by his success at the Y, he decided to abandon all fear. I was already a little nervous -- I knew he was going to be wanting to swim without his special suit today so I wore my bathing suit just in case I needed to get in and save him. So I'm the nervous nellie in the video below trying to get him to jump at the right time and in the right place (I don't think that means I'm a control freak, I think that means I was actually parenting for once).

It's one thing to jump off the edge of the pool and basically land with your hand already on the ladder where your mom in her mismatched bathing suit is waiting for you. But it's completely another thing to do this:

Ha! See? It looks to me like my under-parenting approach is really starting to bear fruit. I think I need to write a book to enlighten all the other mommies.

A Day at IKEA -- Based on the Impossible True Story

Three weeks ago, Dez made me promise her that we would go to IKEA together this past Saturday. If you don't know what IKEA is, I am truly sorry that your TV has been broken for the last ten years and you've been dropped from the mailman's route. Essentially, IKEA is a gigantic, gazillion square foot store full of products to fill Swedish 270 square foot apartments.

I do so love irony.

Those Swedes are clever clever people (is it appropriate to judge an entire country by the one thing I can identify as originating within their borders?). They have designed a store where everyone is funneled from the front door to an escalator that whisks customers directly to the second floor, lest they be tempted to skip the second floor altogether and wander aimlessly around the first floor and perhaps end up at the registers with (gasp) nothing.



(I told Mace that those buggies were made for tiny Swedish children who eat healthy fish diets and not for big American children who only eat mac n' cheese, but he insisted on squeezing himself in there anyway, "I swedish! I fit!")

Now those clever Swedes actually put a childcare center on the first floor, right by the escalator at the front door, so you can just drop off the younger ones to play for 45 minutes or so. When I dropped Mace off there, the non-Swedish girl at the counter asked me to go ahead and fill out the paperwork but that I would probably have to wait a few minutes to get Mace in because they were full -- they were expecting a parent, now five minutes late, back to pick up a child. The non-Swedish girl did not seem troubled or upset by the fact that the parent was late and I realized after I saw the second floor, why the childcare center workers weren't too concerned about the parent being late.

The poor parent was probably lost.



The store is designed like a maze so that customers are basically herded all the way through the store -- if you deviate from the path, you will find yourself at a dead-end, surrounded by duvet covers and shiny purple curtains. It's kind of like venturing off the traditional church path and finding yourself at a church-in-the-box -- it's very shiny and it seems comfortable, but none of the doors lead you to next place, only backwards. But I digress . . . into some sort of strange spiritual reflection no one wants to hear . . .



Anyway . . . finding a bathroom for your seven year old, who suddenly hears nature calling him very loudly, can be an enormous problem in IKEA. When Casey decided he had to "go" we were somewhere in the northeast quadrant of the media/storage section and needed to get to the bathroom by the cafeteria. To get there, we would have had to go through lighting, linens, kids, kitchen stuff, and a bunch of bunkbeds, if I hadn't spotted a "shortcut" door hidden between media and kids. So I used a map (Casey had picked it up -- he loves maps), plotted a course for the potty and we made it there in about four minutes, which was, as it turns out, about all the time we had, if you know what I mean.

Not only is it easy to lose track of where you are in IKEA, it's also easy to lose track of all of the people you came with. In my case, I lost Flamingo Joe at the door. He went to find a Diet Coke (even though he insists he's sworn off them -- I think the habit of using the excuse of finding a Diet Coke to avoid walking around a huge store for hours is just too ingrained in his system and he reverted to the familiar "out" as soon as he saw the sheer magnitude that is IKEA; he panicked, strangled out "I'm going to find a Diet Coke" and sort of staggered away in the direction of the downstairs snack bar) and we didn't see him again until lunch. I lost Dez and Grandma at the top of the escalator when I made the extremely naive mistake of saying, "Casey and I are going to find the kid stuff . . . we'll meet you back over this way in a little while." The naive parts of that statement are: "back over this way" and "in a little while."

Before Casey and I walked away, I did see a semi-panicked look in Dez' eyes, which I attributed to her constant fear that we (the Flamingo family) are going to forget she's with us, no matter where we are (the beach, someone's birthday party, a restaurant, church, Georgia . . . ), and then leave her. She might would acknowledge she has abandonment issues, but I don't think we've ever actually left her anywhere. It's possible that we did and she's just too nice to tell us that we left her while she was in the bathroom at a restaurant in Dunedin and she had to hitch it home, but I personally don't recall that ever happening.

In hindsight, I realized that Dez was the only one of us who'd been in this IKEA before, so when I separated from the group so soon after Joe had abandoned us, she knew it would be over an hour before we saw each other again, simply because once you get separated in IKEA, you need a pack of sled dogs to drag you all around the store to find your party.

And a compass.

Were it not for text messaging, poor Dez would probably still be waiting for us in the "sample" 270 square foot home tucked away by the bathroom department.

At lunchtime, with the assistance of our cell phones, we all managed to find the cafeteria and ate together. I had picked up Mace and we were one big happy IKEA shopping group again. After lunch, which did include (for at least one of our party) swedish meatballs, we all set off together vowing never to be separated again. Or at least Dez and I were vowing that. As soon as we were clear of the cafeteria and down on the first floor, however, Grandma said, "I'm going to go look at the rugs" and off she went. But the rugs were within caterwauling distance and I had attached a location device (Casey -- he can't stand to be separated from me for more than four and a half minutes) to her, so that was okay, and she came back pretty quickly. We all meandered around the kitchen area together for awhile and picked up miscellanous things here and there -- when Dez told me three weeks ago to reserve last Saturday for the IKEA adventure, she specifically told me to make an IKEA envelope so that I would have some money to spend at IKEA. She clearly does not understand how the envelope system works. Apparently she thinks that if there is an envelope, money magically appears in it. Not true. But I did take $6 from my Toiletries/Cosmetics envelope and bought shampoo and conditioner.



At one point, Grandma picked up a box of small wine glasses (which were roundly ridiculed by both Flamingo Joe and Dez as being "not worth the trouble" of putting wine in). But I was very supportive of the purchase (I cannot help it that Joe and Dez are too uncouth to just get up and get a refill, for the love . . . ) and we placed them on the bottom of the cart that Joe was pushing around. Our other cart had a few things for Dez, a few things for Grandma, my shampoo and conditioner, and one toy each for the boys (purchased from their Family Trivia winnings and Dave Ramsey "commissions" -- but that's another blog post altogether).

An hour or two after lunch, we managed to make it all the way around the first floor to the registers, where we saw the first non-cafeteria employees that we had seen all day. That's not completely true -- I did see an employee on the second floor at one point trying to help someone find their loved one they'd lost in the self-assembly basket area several hours before. Regardless, there were practically no employees in IKEA and no one seemed to miss them -- I didn't hear one person ask, "Well let's ask a salesperson." I think it's because you're just too stupefied to ask anything once you're inside and therefore they don't need salespeople (and I would note for the record, that NONE of the employees was tall or blonde, much to Flamingo Joe's disappointment). I'm betting the county commission or the city council, or whichever governmental entity it was that started drooling when IKEA begain inquiring about putting a store here, is really disappointed that IKEA only brought, like, 40 jobs to the area and not 400 (or, if you count like Obama, 400,000).



Where was I? Oh yes, wandering toward the checkout, where, as Flamingo Joe immediately pointed out, every single thing we had put in our carts (except for the small wine glasses)while slowly winding our way through the store, was conveniently displayed for sale in vast quantities within 20 feet of the cash registers. It's the journey, Sweetie, it's the journey.

So we got in line at checkout and Dez, Grandma, and I had to split up lines because I was paying in cash (yes, out of an envelope) and they were paying with debit cards. When we split up and tried to divvy up our stuff out of the basket, we realized that Joe, who was not in line with us and who we could not see anywhere, still had the cart with the little wine glasses. We had left him with the boys at the wicker furniture right behind the checkout lines, but now he (and the boys) were gone. So while we were standing in our separate lines, Dez was trying to call him and I was scanning the packed checkout area to see if I could spot him. Finally, after Dez checked out and Grandma was in the process of checking out, I saw him buying ice cream for the boys at the snack bar near the door.

Trust me when I tell you that I should have known.

I was still in line, so I alerted Dez to his whereabouts and she headed over to get the wine glasses from him so I could pay for them. Apparently, while hanging out with the boys on the wicker furniture, he saw the snack bar and remembered from his visit there four hours prior that they served ice cream. So he immediately left the cart where it was and took the boys over to the snack bar.

Dez went to find the abandoned cart.

We haven't seen her since.

Dental Twilight Zone

Before I post this, I would like to acknowledge to the world at large that I realize I'm not getting any parenting awards this year at the annual convention. I'm okay with that. I take full responsibility for my parenting failures.

That being said . . .

Today was Casey's first visit to the dentist. Yes, I know. He's seven. His first visit should have been at something like three days old if you believe the American Dental Association's recommendations. Or he should at least have gone by the time he turned three, if you believe any of the parents of the children who are actually parenting proactively. I personally believe I have an excuse for not taking Casey to the dentist at the appropriate age: I hate the dentist and all that he or she represents (i.e., shots in my mouth).

When I was Casey's age (possible a year or so younger, but I haven't checked with my mom yet), every single one of my yearly visits (back then the American Dental Association had not convinced the insurance companies that six month cleanings were critical to maintain good dental health) was fraught with fear because the annual visit for the cleaning was always, almost without exception, followed soon thereafter by an appointment for filling cavities. And I use the plural intentionally. My adult mouth is full of fillings from my youth and therefore it could not bring itself to even ask a friend for a referral for a pediatric dentist until this year, when I noticed that our well water was starting to stain Casey's new permanent teeth.

So I asked around and was referred to a dentist who does not allow parents into the exam/cleaning room while the children are with the dentist. His name is Dr. Gerald Copeland. My friend told me that she hates the dentist, too, and she didn't want that experience for her kids, so somehow she found this dentist and her kids love him. She told me they always come out of their appointments smiling. So I put off making the call for a few more weeks and finally succumbed to mommy guilt last week sometime and called to make appointments for both Casey and Mace.

Here's the bottom line regarding our experience with Dr. Copeland's office today:

This ain't yer momma's dentist.

The waiting room at Dr. Copeland's has a bright red VW Bug sitting in it. When Casey and Mace saw the Bug, they immediately forgot why we were there in the first place (to be fair, Mace had no real concept for what a "dentist" is and probably thought the Bug was the dentist) and started playing in the car. We were a few minutes early and there was only one other person in the waiting room -- a grandmother waiting on her granddaughter who was getting a tooth pulled.



We might have waited five minutes or so before an assistant of some sort came out, smiled (I know! Right?? She works in a DENTIST'S office, does she just not know???), and called the kids back. I sort of halfway got out of my chair before I remembered I was supposed to sit there and act cool and relaxed while the children were led away by the nice lady, but it didn't matter because they both just went on back without even looking at me.

So while my children were in the back, I chatted it up with the grandmother. At one point, the dentist himself came out to the waiting area, sat down with the grandmother and updated her on how the granddaughter was doing. And get this -- her granddaughter had fallen asleep while getting her tooth pulled (or possibly immediately thereafter, but still . . . she's at the DENTIST'S office, how could she not notice???).

After what seemed like only ten minutes, but had to be longer, a different smiling assistant/tech came out and summoned me to the back (again with the smiling employees . . . they work in a house of pain . . . what's wrong with them??). I knew now that my day of reckoning had come and I was about to get what I deserved. They were going to tell me what a horrible mother I was for waiting so late to bring Casey in and he already had eight cavities, etc. My children, I was sure, were huddled crying in a room somewhere, gums bleeding, waiting to accuse me of abandoning them to Dr. Pain.

The assistant led me to a room full of oversized stuffed animals, where I discovered my children, covered in stickers, almost bouncing off the walls with happiness, while they rummaged through their goody bags. What the heck? They were at the DENTIST'S! How could they not know?



The assistant then talked with me for several minutes about the kids x-rays and gave them both brushing grades (Mace got a B -- so that's really me getting a B, since I'm the one actually brushing his teeth these days; Casey got a B minus and that's all him; I was fine with these grades while I was there, but then later I wondered: do they ever really sit in that room and tell a mom that her child gets a D minus for brushing? I'm doubting it, and I'm thinking that B minus just might be as low as they go because it's low enough to get your attention, but not so low that you'll be humiliated and not come back). She then informed me that Casey did not have any cavities. I was shocked -- how was it possible that I was not being punished for my failure to properly parent? What kind of game were these people playing at?

And then the dentist himself came in and he was . . . cheerful. And really really nice. And he kept smiling. How is that possible? Does he not know that, as a group, dentists make up a very large percentage of suicide deaths? What is wrong with these people? He answered all my questions and spent quite a bit of time with me and the boys. I don't think he stopped smiling the entire time. It was absolutely surreal -- nothing like the torture chamber I remember from my childhood.

I suppose it's possible that there may be a liberal use of nitrous oxide among both the staff and the patients at this office . . . but even if that is true, I'm okay with that. It doesn't seem to be interfering with anyone's ability to do their jobs -- my kids' teeth were quite clean -- and no one was laughing uncontrollably, so what's the harm, really?

When we left, I didn't even have to take the kids to get ice cream or a toy as a reward for being so good at the dentist's. They just wanted a few more minutes in the waiting room to play on the Bug -- they weren't at all afraid that the dentist would come out and get them again and drill some holes in their teeth.

That's just weird.