This time last week I had big dreams of spending an entire week doing nothing but sleeping late and watching a bunch of episodes of Scooby-Doo in between trips to the pool. It would be like my sophomore year of college all over again.
Instead, we ended up having a week filled with various activities that kept us busy. Unfortunately, none of those activities were actually on my official to-do list.
Not that I really have an official list, but if I did it’s safe to say that going over to Gulley’s house and eating Church’s chicken for lunch wouldn’t be on it. Although it totally should be.
The reality is that P has a list for me that includes things like getting my oil changed, taking my car to be inspected, and getting my tires rotated. How am I supposed to get all that done with my hectic pool schedule? It’s bad enough that the summer is already half over and I haven’t even started watching “Veronica Mars” on DVD which was totally going to be one of my summertime shows.
Anyway, our weekend didn’t turn out to be any less action-packed than the previous week, so I have big plans to stay in my pajamas until noon today. I’m not even ashamed to admit it.
The big drama in our weekend occurred Saturday evening. We’d met a bunch of our friends at the pool to swim and eat dinner. Unfortunately, it was the one hour in the entire summer that thunder was heard in the distance so the kids had to entertain themselves by just running around the pool area for the better part of an hour. They were having a great time playing hide and seek all around the men and womens’ bathrooms (ewww) while all the adults caught up on life. All of a sudden we hear shrieking. Loud shrieking. Loud shrieking that is coming from my child.
At first I thought she stubbed her toe but then my motherhood instincts told me she’d been stung by a bee, mainly because she was screaming, “I GOT STUNG BY A BEE! I GOT STUNG BY A BEE!” I ran over and picked her up because she’d actually stepped on the bee and it stung her on the bottom of her foot. As soon as I got her over to where we were sitting, I got her to show me exactly where she’d been stung while Gulley went all MacGyver on us, grabbed her credit card and used it to flick the stinger out of Caroline’s foot. I haven’t seen her use a credit card that fast since we were in college and she used her daddy’s card to buy some fab new boot shoes at Foley’s.
(They were worth every penny, too.)
I put some ice on the sting and applied some Benadryl which seemed to help. Oddly enough, this legitimately painful incident elicited far less drama and hysteria than we often experience when she’s discovered she left her favorite swimsuit at Mimi and Bops’ house. About ten minutes after the sting, the lifeguards blew the all-clear whistle to get back in the pool and she was off and swimming with her buddies.
They all agreed that P made a fantastic pool flotation device.
We swam until we shut the pool down and then headed home to get not nearly enough sleep before it was time to get up for church. I knew Caroline was tired yesterday afternoon when we were sitting on the couch watching the end of “Charlotte’s Web”. There was a winter scene that showed snow and all of a sudden she turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, “Mama, I’m just so sad that it never snows here. It just makes me so sad I’m going to cry.”
First of all, why are we concerned about snow when it’s 112 degrees outside? Secondly, if you’re going to get upset about something how about the universal health care plan? Third, how much fun is puberty going to be? Poor P is probably going to have to take some type of sedative to survive all the hormonal fluctuations in this house.
Yesterday afternoon we went back to the pool so we could all hang out again but this time we decided to bypass the pool grill for dinner because there is only so much popcorn shrimp prepared by cranky teens that you can eat in a lifetime. P decided it would be fun to have everyone back over to our house for burgers, so we left the pool a little early to get everything ready.
About twenty minutes later Gulley came hobbling into the house while the kids danced excitedly around her and announced that she’d stepped on a bee and got stung on the bottom of her foot. Fortunately, Caroline and Jackson had the presence of mind to run and get her credit card.
Fortunately for her, no one sells cute boot shoes at the pool so it’s safe to assume they only used it for medicinal purposes.