Beach Trip

We were supposed to go to my 20th college reunion at Brown this weekend. After the late unpleasantness with the SUV and a long hard semester for all of us that seemed like too much of a trip so I decided we’d pile in the car for a family beach trip. (My sister did make an appearance and informed me that the 20th reunion was packed and that I would have had a really god time…..) My plan involved all of us sleeping late and reading lots of fiction. By a little after 8 and Rebecca and I had already been for a beach run and she was ready something with a code on the computer so that a child in African can have a free computer. This is the kid who usually has to be dragged out of bed even on the weekends and stands as an argument for adding caffeine to morning cheerios. The run may be connected to the lovely running skort and jog bra shirt ensemble that Aunt Pami bought her last year which resembles mine very closely. So there we were in our matching get ups running along the beach. The big kids seem thrilled to be at the beach and had their feet in the ocean within minutes of getting here. I’m not sure they actually remember the beach in Long Island but they claim to and it’s true that we went to the beach about every other day when we lived there. Jonathan has reconnected with his wet suit style bathing suit and face mask and is ready for a dip and Eli turned the sweet little plastic digging toys into guns and has already shot most of our neighbors.

Rebecca has taken to singing all the time, sometimes in a very loud and annoying way. She did it this morning with some little French songs which turned out to be fortuitous. The nicely dressed French couple across the way assumed she spoke French and left us with a beach umbrella and two beach chairs. Eli’s loud chanting of the four questions at the fried fish emporium where we ate lunch earned us nothing but some odd stares. The beach fashion here seems by the way to involve string bikini’s not the lands end skort type of suits sported at the pool in cville.

It’s now 4 in the afternoon and Rebecca is back at the beach with Manuel while the boys cuddle up together watching nascar. I think this is a terrible parenting move as I think that while I was at the pool with the big kids Manuel told Eli that he couldn’t go to the beach until he attempted nap. I have now rewarded him with terrible tv in bed.

I’m choosing between reading a romance novel by a Shakespeare scholar friend or writing an abstract. While doped up on narcotics I mistakenly promised someone an essay on Women and Print Culture in Late Renaissance Italy. I have nothing to say about this at this particular juncture so have to think up something I might actually want to write about. I also promised to advice a few undergraduate thesis projects while on leave. I’ll have to get myself out of that.