Post-vacation blues

This is my favorite time of the year: golden, sunny Indian summer. I love everything about this time of year: the fresh crispness of air, the pumpkinness of assorted beverages, the apple cider, the hay rides. Halloween, of course! We usually go on a little vacation in September, and I love that as well. What I don't love is coming back from the said vacation and finding out that we have no more childcare.

Yep, our beloved babysitter/nanny quit on us. Granted, there is a very good reason and that's why there's almost no cursing in this post, but still. I'm a "little frantic". We were given a one-week notice. ONE WEEK!!!! WHAATTT???One week isn't even long enough to find a reliable landscaper, forget about someone to watch your children. So I'm very very very very upset, hurt and a feel a wee bit betrayed. Had we known this was coming, we most likely would not have gone away. But we didn't, and this is what we did during our blissfully stress-free week:

We went to Virginia Beach and stayed in a really nice place with two heated pools and hot tubs, dubbed "japuzzies" by zaiki. We learned to swim (a little bit) and to put our heads under water. We learned that Maya is terrified of the ocean and that Sonya is virtually fearless. We learned that clams are super yummy and that fighter jets flying over your head every 10 minutes for a week is difficult to get used to.

 

The place we stayed was super nice, clean and accommodating. One crucial mistake we made was to get a one-bedroom condo. We decided that the kids will sleep in the bedroom and we will take a pull-out bed in the living room to have access to the balcony/kitchen/TV/adult stuff.  We should have known that "pull-out bed" is a hotelier slang term for "muahaha-your-back-will-be-ruined-bed", or maybe for "Chinese torture instrument bed". After a few nights we gave up, realized that, if we keep sleeping on it, no "adult stuff" will happen in the foreseeable future due to pinched nerves in the back, and decided to share the king size bed with zaiki, who look deceptively snugly and sweet when they are asleep. That was another fatal mistake. Have you ever been repeatedly kicked by a very young, robust and stubborn donkey? No? I think that after two nights sleeping next to Maya I can approximate what that feels like. The child is like a hot, hard little lump of sharp edges. To add to that, Sonya kept having night terrors, which meant she'd periodically start screaming "my cookies" and trying to crawl away somewhere, punching and kicking. And she peed the bed the last night we were there. Bonus! So between all that we haven't slept the whole week.

We enjoyed the pool, "japuzzi", fresh seafood. We biked down the boardwalk, played in the sand. It was fun. On one rainy day we went up to Williamsburg, and I fell in love with that area. We drove over the Cheesapeke Bay Bridge and I kept trying to imagine what awe the first settlers must have felt when they first saw the vastness of the land in front of them after months at sea.

Kevin's sister came up for a couple of days and got to sleep on the sofa bed (muahahaha). Kevin and I went out for a nice meal alone and had oysters.

Drive back home was interesting, the highlight being feeding zaiki yogurt in the parking lot of the FoodLion grocery store with a fork, because the grocery store didn't have plastic spoons and we didn't think to pack any. That night we got caught in the downpour  that followed us all the way from Delaware to Jersey. After we arrived, Husband remarked that he would like to have a beer, provided we can pry his hands from the steering wheel.

Coming home was really the best part. Sleeping in our nice, big and zaiki-free bed was like heaven. I haven't slept like that in weeks. So we were really happy settling back into our routines until I got the call from the babysitter. Now we are starting from square one. But in every challenge, there is an opportunity. We'll work it out, we'll be fine. I have to remind myself about that, because today I've been vacillating between tears and panic.

What have you been up to?

All right, I've been slacking and not keeping up with my blog. I'll try to be better at it. That's what we've been up to recently:

- Finally sleeping without pull-ups, therefore, completely and officially are BIG GIRLS
- Learned that one has to poop in the big potty, not into a little portable one (makes Mama cranky)
- Played soccer
- Tried to ride bikes and decided that it's not as much fun as sitting in the bike trailer while Papa pulls you
- Developed a sense of humor (no, really, making up song words and everything!)
- Got fancy "babysuits" (bathing suits in zaiki-speak)
- Grew tremedously
- Learned that baking cookies=cookie dough=yummy
-Turned three!!!!! A big milestone for zaiki-sized people, something that truly separates babies from big girls

As for me, I finished summer with a nice fancy trip to the emergency room on the account of low blood pressure. I'm fine now, thanks to a bag of fluids and hot food pumped into me, and off to my first teaching internship, which I am super excited about.