A Year About

We’ve been slow to post lately because waiting for our house to sell is a pain and we didn’t want to fill the blog with lots of entries expressing that! Still waiting. But in the mean time we just wrapped up a great week at Rehoboth Beach, DE with my family. The weather was excellent, the water was cool but swim-able, and the kids were wired on Candy Kitchen treats and the excitement that comes from 24 hours of playing (with a little sleeping).

This trip is a reunion of sorts for my family, since we really haven’t been able to get everyone together otherwise. My brother Ed, his wife Cibyl, and their three: Emma, Jeremy, and William; my sister Kathy, her husband Mike and their daugther Annie; us and my parents. We came to Rehoboth as a family many summers when I was a kid, so it’s nice to enjoy the familiarity of the place. It’s much more built-up now, but some things never change, like Funland and its classic (bumper cars and the Paratrooper), cheesy (the Haunted Mansion), and ancient (the kiddie rides are the same I rode) rides.

You haven’t spent enough time on the beach until you’ve got a nice heat rash going. Check. I avoided major sunburn. Good. I didn’t nap. Too bad. But got a good way through Greene’s Journey Without Maps. It’s great for two reasons. One, Greene is a brilliant travel writer. Two, our jaunt in the Airstream around the US seems positively easy compared with trekking through the unpredictable Liberian bush. Biggest plus for us: no malaria. Yippee!

We had yet another open house today (come on, you all, just buy the house already!) and our plan was to spend the day at the pool. But when we woke up this morning, we found a very rainy day outside and had to come up with Plan B. So after lunch at Panera we visited the movie store and rented “White Fang”, the movie based on the book by Jack London. It was in the kid’s section, how bad could it be, I thought? Remind me to check the back of the movie next time for the rating. We realized after one guy got attacked and killed by wolves and the mother wolf got fatally wounded by a gun and her pup (White Fang) found her lying outside the den, bleeding out of her mouth and Elise was in tears for the third time in 10 minutes, that this movie was rated PG. Not what we usually get for her.

So we talked her out of hiding in our bedroom for the rest of the movie, skipped the scene where White Fang is put into a vicious dog fight and deeply wounded before being rescued, and enjoyed the rest of the movie. It was a fun (except the damage-to-Elise’s-psyche part) way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon and it was good to know that we can all get along in the trailer on a rainy day.