When we first arrived at our friends' beach house I was already a mess. I was afraid that our unruly, chaotic mop of a dog would pee in their house. I kept thinking about all of the things which I had forgotten to pack. It was hot. I was already tired. Of course, the biggest worry, as always, was about how Josh would do. This was a place where we had never stayed before and Josh is always stressed by new places.
We always let Josh stay in the car as long as possible while the rest of us unpack the car and get situated in any new place. Alex brought all of Josh's accoutrements into the room which he would get to stay in all by himself: his stereo, his Ipad, his magnadoodle toy. When there was nothing left to unpack I went out to the van to coax Josh to come in. I can't remember if I had to bribe him with a snack . . . probably yes.
I feel bad saying this but, with our family, going on any trip is a big fat risk. We're definitely had our share of family trips that have spectacularly NOT gone well. For the past twelve years, we have had the most success vacationing at our dear friends' lake cabin in the mountains. Josh gets to stay in the basement family room where it's quiet and he gets his own space. He loves it and he knows what to expect. If he hears us mentioning "the lake cabin" Josh will start saying "wanna go to the lake cabin" over and over again. But this year our friends are in the midst of a remodeling project so it wasn't an option. Also, we happen to be in the middle of a pandemic this summer so we assumed that we would just stay put. Just when being in our house was going to drive us fully bonkers, some other friends reached out asking if we might want to stay at their beach place about an hour away. Uh, yeah!
Today is our third day here and we finally felt ready to take the risk to take Josh down the mini-hike down to the beach. The last time we took Josh to the beach, he didn't like it and he wanted to go home right away, which was a bummer for the rest of us. But the beauty of this place was just so ridiculous that we had to try again. Hope went down earlier than the rest of us and she texted me, "MOM! THERE ARE DOLPHINS!" I looked out of the main bedroom's window and, sure enough, I could see a pod of dolphins frolicking in the water below not far from the shore.
That was it. I summoned the energy to pack up all of our beach stuff and drag Josh down the path and three sets of very steep steps down to the beach. He was scared but he held tight to the guard rail and my t-shirt and carefully headed down.
It was pretty much love at first sight. Josh plopped himself down in the wet sand and, for the next two hours, delighted in the sensory input of the cool waves hitting his body. He was like a little brown lighthouse of joy, waving his arms in the air, laughing loudly and saying some of his favorite words; "feelings!", "abortion!", "cocaine!", "train!". Several people walked by and gave us a smile.
Alex and I took turns closely supervising him in the water while admiring how well the girls had taken to boogie boarding. We each got some time to ourselves under the umbrella to read as well.
To top it all off, I quickly found that if I dug into the wet sand a little bit with my feet, it was not too hard to find clams! Be still my immigrant heart! Not only was this day going so well but was I going to have FREE seafood to cook for dinner as well? This is crazy!
Ok. Not everything in a given day has to be perfect in order for a day to be wonderful. It turned out that there is a quarantine on shellfish in this area because of an abundance of a certain marine bio-toxin so we couldn't eat the clams. Also, one of my supposedly independent teens elected to not apply sunscreen prior to swimming in the ocean for hours so some amount of wailing about crispy skin ensued. But we all agreed that the day had been very good and we were filled with gladness and gratitude.
