Easter beachsters

In 2009, we took the boys to the beach for Easter. Last year Corey was deployed and we did not go. This year, we decided early on that we wanted to go back to the beach and started looking at affordable condo rentals instead of the four of us roughing it in a hotel room for 4-5 days. Easter Sunday happened to fall on the one-year anniversary of Erin's passing, so we gave the boys a choice to go to the beach for Easter or stay with their mom's family and observe the anniversary. They choose beach and returning with shells to place on their mom's grave.

I get very stressed and pissy before I travel. Planning, packing, readying the household for an absence and making sure the furchildren are pampered while we are gone almost sucks the joy out of any roadtrip for me. It stresses me the hell out packing up four people and a dog to go see my parents in Jena. At one point last week (it may have been on the day we were packing to leave) Corey called me a dragon. Not untrue, but also not helpful.

We left after work on Thursday and got to Okaloosa Island (between Fort Walton and Destin, FL) around 10 PM. Landen slept the last part of the trip while Jake watched Thundercats, Season One. The condo had a bedroom, bunk beds built into the hall and a sleeper sofa. The boys went for the bunks the first night and the sleeper sofa after that. Friday, Saturday and Sunday were beach days. The schedule went like this:

9 AM - Wake up and eat breakfast (this was actually the time they were allowed to wake up the parents.)

10 AM - Covered in sunscreen, head down to the beach.

11:15 AM - Move from beach setup (chairs and umbrella came with the condo) to pool to rinse off.

11:30 AM - Return to condo for lunch and rest

1:00 PM - Trek back down to beach, sunscreened, with full load: two beach bags, two folding chairs, ice chest, sand toys, body boards

4:00 PM - Pack up beach party and return to pool

4:30 PM - Return to condo to shower, put on clean pajamas, watch TV, eat dinner and then Little Debbies (except Saturday night when we went out to dinner)

It's the best beach schedule and I highly recommend it.

We had a yellow flag on the first day, which was manageable, and a red flag on days #2 and #3. The waves were rough and big and the undertow was strong. The boys were only allowed in the water when one of the adults was in the water or standing at the water's edge. Corey bought them body boards at Target and Jake really took to this activity. He would let the waves separate him a bit from his dad and his brother, stay shallow, and ride the hell out of that tiny Sponge Bob body board. It was very intense to watch him, so methodical in choosing his waves. Our oldest is nothing if not focused and intent on activities of his choosing.

Landen preferred to be in the water with Corey, trying not to fall down and body surfing in. He had a Sponge Bob board of his own, and would use it with Jake when Corey was taking a break from the water. There was one point when Corey was out alone that the undertow was so strong he feared being washed away, so exhausted was he from trying to fight the pull of the water. So all of the water-activities were very supervised. This is but one of the many differences between coming to the beach with your girlfriends and coming with your children - you cannot cover your face with a shirt and take a nap or devote all of your attention to the latest edition of People.

During the vacation, Landen developed the worst bout of smartassitis I've ever experienced with him. I know it took great restraint on the part of his father that we managed a spankless vacation. At Fudpuckers, I asked him not to play all over the dinner table with his balloon animal, and he said it wasn't OUR dinner table. Sunday night I told him that was his last Reese's egg for the evening, and he sharply pointed out that Corey was still eating candy. He was asked to pick up the bucket of sand toys and carry them up from the beach, and he shot back that he didn't ask anybody to bring the sand toys TO the beach. These are but three of the 25+ that occurred in a four-day period. It was so bad that at one point he was saying he wasn't having fun on vacation because he kept getting in trouble. He rallied, because he managed to go all day on Monday without pissing his parents off. And six hours on the road in a car does not happy families make.

Jake, on the other hand, managed to hold it together all vacation until the car ride on Monday. You see, we do not give him the stimulant medication for his ADHD on days he is not at school. When his father was deployed and he was in extreme emotional turmoil, unmedicated days were the days he would scream at me and I would send him to his room and sit downstairs and cry. He did that to me one time with Corey home to witness it and has not done it since. Now Jake's explosiveness (which is rare) is released in crying big tears for absolutely no reason whatsoever, when he's in the company of his father. So Monday morning was the fourth day since he'd had a stimulant, and he was due. But the time lunch at Cracker Barrel rolled around and he started crying because he couldn't have bacon on his cheeseburger, I knew what kind of day we were in for.

Did you know that there are chemicals in caffeine that trigger the same corrections to neuro-deficiencies caused by ADHD that the stimulant medications do? Jake's medicine that he takes on school days effects his dopamine levels and reduces blood flow in his brain, which allows for increased focus and attention levels and better impulse control. Caffeine does the same thing. So on a Saturday or a holiday or a summer day, when Jake's brain goes wonky, I shove a Coke at him. We have the support of a psychologist and a pediatrician on this. I'm not sure Corey believed me until he saw the heaviness lift from Jake's face at the Cracker Barrel, and now he's a believer. Letting the 53-lb. ten-year-old have caffeine as part of his daily routine is unhealthy and ill-advised, but in a pinch, when shit is getting heated at the Cracker Barrel (or when he's yelling at a nun that her office is the devil's den), caffeine is our friend. Also, since I have a son and a husband who struggle with pretty severe ADHD that heavily effects their executive functioning, the boys' psychologist recommended I read Late, Lost, and Unprepared: A Parents' Guide to Helping Children with Executive Functioning. It explains in applicable and layman's terms how ADHD affects the "command and control" functions of the brain and tricks to modify those behaviors. It's equally applicable to children and husbands. I recommend it to those of you with similar struggles. This has been a public service announcement on educated parenting and wifelihood.

Anyway, aside from the occasional hiccups that any family as quirky as ours is bound to experience when going on vacation (we're no Griswalds), it was wonderful, amazing, enjoyable family time. Thrills me that I picked the beachy coral print for the curtains in the dining and living rooms. My memories of my beach time with my family when I was little are a prized possession, and I am beyond grateful that Corey and I get to give those kinds of memories to our kids. We want to take them on a cruise before Jake is old enough to hate hanging out with us.

We have until about age twelve, right?

I leave you with a slideshow of thirty of my favorite shots of the weekend, in no particular order. I'm only in one of them. I prefer it that way.

The Landscaping Adventure That Almost Wasn't

For six months, we have been planning a landscaping weekend for my Dad to come down with various tools and machinery and tend to various and unsightly problems with our front yard. (The back yard is a separate trip.) This included buying sod, which is apparently the more costly and more attractive alternative to grass seed, so this had a budget of more-than-one-but-less-than-five-hundred dollars. We were not deterred by this project with the federal shutdown looming, until we got word as my parents were packing the truck to leave Jena, that Corey's mid-month pay would be half of the usual if the government shut down on Friday at midnight. This would mean that we would have to exhaust our landscaping budget to subsidize the missing pay and buy necessities like fuel to get the children to school and food to feed them when they told us they wanted to eat. 

For reasons far more pressing than our plans for beautifying our front yard, we were relieved when Congress struck a deal at the 11th hour to keep government open. Trying not to get all uptight and worried about something is every bit as exhausting as just going ahead and getting all uptight and worried about it, so Corey and I had to hug it out when CNN broke the news late last night that there would be no shutdown and he would get a full paycheck. We went to bed and this morning my dad showed up with a chainsaw, a tiller, some shovels, an ax and a saw.

The only pine trees in our subdivision are in our front yard. We hate them. The roots of these suckers have eaten our neighbor's driveway, which he had to dig up and repave. They are starting to pop up our driveway, so taking the chainsaw to the roots was priority on the list. Dad took at them with a chainsaw and the shovels while Corey whipped some ass with an ax older than he is. So old, in fact, that after every fourth swing he would have to tap the top of it on the root for fear the blade was just going to fly right off. Landen got dressed and came out to help, but we made him stay on the house side of the sidewalk, to protect him from debris and flying ax blades. He was allowed to inspect the progress when no gas or man-powered machinery was in operation.

As it turned out, the tentacles of our pine trees are strong and mighty and some of them cannot be removed. Death will visit them, because they were severed from the tree. But complete removal as Corey and Dad has envisioned was not possible without a winch. Lots of winches in Jena. No winches to be borrowed in Baton Rouge. We poured dirt over it and laid down some sod and we'll water the hell out of it and see what a couple good south Louisiana rains to do how unsightly this is.

When we bought this house, half the front yard (the part with the 20+ year-old crepe myrtle) was covered with burgundy chips and weird bushes. We have removed the weird bushes and most of the ground cover incrementally because I wanted grass there. This morning there was a very old tiller fired up so the dirt could be loosened, fertilized and prepped for sod. The pine trees across the tiny yard have millions of little roots coming all the way up to the house, it appears, so there was lots of whacking and pulling of roots that I did not capture in pictures. I also requested that they remove the brick border because grass needed to come up to the edges of the sidewalk and driveway.

Jake came out periodically in his pajamas and his bedhair to check on everybody, but did not take enough interest in participating to put clothes on. That's not true. Corey  made them stack bricks and he did it in those pajamas.

After this there was a handoff. Corey had to go to work for a little while and Dad and I took off to Home Depot to get sod for $1.59 per 1x2 foot piece. We ended up using 72 pieces in the yard. Great Clare stayed behing to tend to the boys. Justin was waiting to take over for Corey when Dad and I got back from Home Depot. He used an ax to cut sod in puzzle pieces to line up the odd-shaped area of yard.

And someone picked up some beer along the way.

And then (six hours after we first fired up the chainsaw) there was LAWN! And the irises Dad put in the brand-new edged circle around the crepe myrtle. Murphy has more grass in the front yard to make deposits on! We did leave about two-feet off the front porch to add shrubbery later. I'm thinking gardenias so I can sit on my porch swing and smell my flowers while I drink white wine and watch Murphy take dumps on the lovely St. Augustine we just lovingly placed in the yard. Now it looks like this, which is glorious, and after six weeks of watering it every day and not cutting it we'll have a full natural lawn!

The plan was for Dad to grill steaks but everybody needed to shower first. ALL the boys were filthy, even Murphy, so every Allbritton boy got a shower or bath. I even needed to get clean even though I did nothing but share my vision, supervise, make a hefty charge to my Home Depot Card and take pictures. I mean it, y'all. I did not lift a frigging finger. By the time I got in the bath there was very little hot water, but even Jake and Landen did more manual labor than I did today, so I took my lukewarm bath. I did bathe the dog, who'd been laying in tilled dirt every chance he got all day. Even he was entitled to hot water.

We got to put everybody at our dining table, extending it for the first time, while we chowed on New York strips, Dad's famous potatoes, salad with homemade ranch dressing, garlic bread, Snickers cake (I bought it) and vanilla ice cream. I took no pictures of any of this. But I did take some pictures of the food afterglow, like Jake chillaxing with Great Don, Landen getting all excited about watching Men in Black II later and Dixie being rubbed by five people at the same time.

Corey and Landen had a slap-off, which I'm not posting video of, but Landen won. Wrestling makes me nervous. Everybody's having a great time until someone's ear gets boxed and then I get pissed as the mom and forced spectator.

It was a beautiful, beautiful day. All my people I love most in the world were under the same roof, my roof, the roof my husband and I own and care for. Then everybody went back to their respective hotels/apartments/couch beds (it's Slumber Party Saturday!) and Murphy and I piled into my bed to watch Grease 2, sing the lyrics to Cydney via text message and play with our pictures and blog.

I mean it. I did NONE of the work today. But I love the shit out of everybody who did.

This is the longest blog post ever.
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Till there was you...

This weekend was the first weekend I had no husband and no children since December 18th, when Corey came home. The boys were with their grandparents and Corey had his first drill back. Murphy and I slept a lot, painted some furniture, cleaned a very minimal amount and did a disproportionate amount of lolling about on the couch. It's what we were doing at the time I started this post, having just slep through all of Interview With a Vampire. I also spent the weekend collecting thoughts on how different my life was before the introduction of the inhabitants of this love nest.

Now that I'm 31, I have loved or hated Corey Allbritton for more than half my life. Life sans Corey means that there was never three pairs of shoes and dirty socks and underwear lying around the floor on one side of the room. The sheets on the bed remained tucked in at the bottom corners. I would not know where and how to pin a CIB on an ACU. I would not know what a CIB or an ACU were. I would never have been pushed to my emotional limits. Until I married Corey, I was waiting for someone to show me my purpose. I would not know what it was like to fall head over heels in love with someone every time I watched them close their eyes and take a breath in with every hug they got from their children.

Till there was Jake, I never heard myself apologizing to a nun for someone calling her office the "devil's den." I never, ever made a cake that didn't have icing on it, or intentionally left some cupcakes un-iced. I didn't buy or cook corn on the cob, broccoli or green beans. My middle-of-the-night-get-up-to-tinkle did not include tip-toeing upstairs to apply Vaseline to the entire bottom half of someone's face. I never knew the joy of seeing the clouds on a sad child's face part and respond to something with pure delight. Before I knew Jake, I'd only felt the heartbreak of a cheating boyfriend or the death of a relative, not the heartache of a child in pain that you cannot help. I never hoped that a kid would touch me, much less mean it.

Till there was Landen, no one had ever told me I was The Worst. The only person met before him who hated onions as much as I do was my Aunt Soupie. I'd never been told my cooking was "not so good" or that my chocolate cake was the "best only I can make." The last time I'd seen a hiney that cute was on his dad in 1995. Before Landen, I'd never experienced the dichotomy of being completely amused and entertained by someone and never wanting to hear their voice again in the same car ride. No one had ever hugged me and said "I'm never letting go." Without Landen, I never would have mastered maintaining anger while trying not to laugh. I would have no one for whom to dread their teenage years. I would be older than this before someone attached themselves to me as their mom.

Before there was Murphy, I did not consider myself a "dog person." I would certainly never let someone's dog lick my face, wipe his face on my pillow or eat off my plate. I had never stepped barefoot in shit before. I paid no attention to those statistics that say dogs improve heart and cholesterol health and are good for mental illness and grief. I never imagined the joy of having the dog who, were he human, I'm sure would be a cross between Alfafa from The Little Rascals and Rip Taylor. I would sit in my white chair watching my evening shows with my arms empty and no fuzzy, twenty-eight pound being cradled in my arms.

Lily was here before any of them were. I barely remember a me without Lily. She'll turn twelve this year. I tell Jake and Landen that she'll still be here when they go to college. She's what keeps Landen from being afraid of zombies and ghosts - he trusts her as his personal alarm system for threats to his safety. I have moved her into TWELVE homes in as many years. Then I had the nerve to bring home a man. Then his two kids. Then the dog. We have never demoted her status as High Priestess of our house. Murphy sleeps in his kennel every night so that Lily may reclaim her rightful place in our bed. And the most ironic development of her life is that now, when the boys are home, she's probably in their room, keeping watch. She stacks herself in with the stuffed animals or stretches out in a basket of clothes (clean or dirty) and observes. And because we continue to evolve as a family, she now lets BOTH the children from whom she has previously drawn vicious blood (Jake from his HEAD) rub her affectionately.

This is my home. This weekend it was clean and quiet. By Saturday evening, I'd had about all of that madness I could take.

Click here if you love The Music Man.

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