Sunday, September 30, 2012

Florida post script story



We went to  Mai-Kai in  Ft. Lauderdale, It is a Polynesian restaurant that has a Polynesian musical and dance review.  The place is walled in with lush flowering garden paths, totems, waterfalls, a huge wood fired oven, a bar that has that 'Interior of Yellow Submarine decor'. The rest was 'Authentic Island Village' It was like southeast Asia in the Disney Universe. You wander around, they seat you, you eat then watch a show.
Anyway the show is introduced by a gloriously beautiful lady with long black hair, wearing a bikini top and grass skirt, and immediately E is transfixed. Z was asleep on my lap. The drums start and two wild looking men leap out and shriek and stomp and dance in mad patterns around the stage.
Z is oblivious.
E is having a physical, full sensory reaction.
Then the women come out and they are gyrating their hips in circles and make percussion with their accessories.
E is delighted.
Dad is trying to wake up Z.
The ladies danced the hula around the men. Their long, black hair swayed.
Z finally woke up.
The men danced with fire sticks and put fire on their skin without getting burned.
The men danced a war dance with spears and Z was now totally and completely engaged.
 Z was now a disciple.
The beautiful, wild ladies joined the fire dance.
E turned to her father and said, "Daddy, If you married her... then, she could be my mother and I could know how to dance like that."
Also, my drink came in a tiki face take-home cup. But had I paid more attention, I would have read somewhere on the menu, that my husband's drink did not. I walked out with both.  I was stopped at the door by the hostess who said, "Ma'am, I can't let you take that cup."

Recap: Went to theme restaurant. Daughter now plotting to replace me. Son has internalized the Samoan Dance of War. Got caught stealing cup.



 

Friday, September 28, 2012

And here we are: Fall



And now it is Fall. The trees are turning, the nights, cool. You take the time to reflect on the summer. There is hardly time to reflect, but you do it anyway. Remembering how the kids learned to swim and how they made it out to the floating dock reserved for big kids. Your little kids are now big somehow. They dove to the bottom of the lake and followed fish. You smile, thinking about the camping trips you had with your family. The smile falters as you remember the time you woke up in the middle of the night with the worst nausea. Spending the next day running to the hot, public campground toilets to relieve yourself out both ends as everyone else went for a hike.  It was food poisoning. It was 24 hour flu! Oh well, There is nothing you can do about that now.  Don’t worry about it. So what if no one believes you.






Remember countless bike rides, the Boy’s training wheels off for good. Proudly watching as he rode into trees, walls, houses, other bikes, dogs.  Cruising down hills and watching as your son sails over his handlebars and skids across the pavement because he “forgot the stop part”.


Ah the beauty of summer: The garden grew well this year. Kids helped plant that. That has been a nice thing. The kids got their own plot to plant. The girl’s was choked with flowers, the boy’s rather empty as he could not stop experimenting with his seeds. Some went here, some there.  Planted, dug up, re-planted. And that is how tomatoes started growing in the blueberries. Some experiments were not so successful: Bugs, for example, do not grow into bug plants, and worms don’t make good pets: A worm leash tends to cut the worm in half, for instance.

new lavendar

E's garden


New apple tree


bee balm

Giant cone flower(because I can't spell 'ecanaeshea')

You smile at the memories of hikes in the White Mountains, where you unleashed all manner of trickery to convince your children they like the hikes you and your husband force them to endure. So successful were you that, huzzah! It took! And although they are bewildered by their own enthusiasm, they declare themselves ‘real hikers’. You floated down rivers, scrambled over rocks, had campfires, read “The Witches” by Roald Dahl to them and they are at that perfect age where they believe every word of it and are now forever on high alert to blue toothed, no toed, gloved handed, itchy headed ladies who want to destroy them.

You sent the kids to their grandparent’s house and met your husband in Florida where he was working. A few days of being alone:  All day to yourself, evenings with your handsome and charming husband. Maybe it was the heat of late summer Florida, maybe the rush of being without your kids and responsibilities but wasn’t that night on the boardwalk fun: Dinner, dancing. Dancing like no one was watching. Like a free bird. Except there were people watching. And they saw.  Pierina Legnani was not under threat as it turned out. And as your husband so gleefully re-enacted in the elevator back up to the room, Dancing like no one is watching is not sound advice.

The most useless sink in the world. At the museum of art in Ft. Lauderdale. You have to reach across 36"of shallow sink to get at water, which beacuse of it's lack of depth splashes everywhere. Fashion over function = not good for bathrooms.

Bananna boat. Transports only banannas. Has huge fans because potasium gas is very flammable. I thought this was way cooler that the mansions this boat ride took me to see.

Someone living the dream. Illegally tied to a hurricane devastated dock.


Hollywood beach. You can smell the sunscreen and sweat from the hotel balcony when the wind is right.

Another way of saying "No refunds if birds shit in your food."

Oprah likes this place and we did too. NOT FOR VEGETARIANS!!

Then the children went back with you for another visit to Florida, and they dictated the agenda. There was much swimming in the hotel pool, much avoiding of the ocean after they realized the omnipresent helicopters were not looking for bad guys, but for SHARKS. 






all these were from Ft. Lauderdale museum of art's SHARK exhibit

  There was cuddling of alligators which is somehow great. Sharks= not cool, Alligators=awesome. Something to do with the airboat ride, you guess.

"This is as close as I am getting to the Mastodon"


Kids were very worried for this little dude

High alert for alligators

Officially the coolest dude in Florida



Bike car



Then school started and on that first ever recess of her first ever day of grade 1, the girl fractures her arm. Always something, And here we are. Fall.