Cars, cars, cars!

Cars. If my children have inherited any OCD traits from their mother, than Donovan's obsession is cars. He used to be fascinated with Hummers (still is, to a certain extent), and we have no less than 8 different Hummer toy trucks in the house. As of late, his obsession has shifted to Cars (and since watching the Pixar movie of the same title, Lightning McQueen #95 in particular). And he got indulged BIG TIME on his birthday.

Aside from the Cars Playstation2 game referenced in yesterday's blog, he got a bunch of different sized cars on his birthday, all from the hit movie. He was in HEAVEN! Thank goodness Grampy had the foresight to buy dozens of AA-sized batteries (my personal favorite present, as we seem to go through 3-5 batteries daily, as we cycle them from dozens of battery-operated cars now in the house).

What happened to toy cars that you sorta pushed along with your hands, the kind I used to play with in the sandbox of my backyard? Todays cars have buttons that beep and honk and play music (yes, music -- and not very tasteful music at that). They have headlights that glow, and engines that roar. And you don't dare take them outside to the sandbox for fear that sand will get in their sensitive electronics and break them, or jam up the wheels.

Ah well, look at the expression on his face. Another car. His collection of cars easily numbers in the tripple digits, but that doesn't lessen the delight and happiness of getting ... a new car!

Top-Rated Game? Cars!

I never got a chance to see the Cars movie -- the boys went to go see that flick with their mother. But I've read the bedtime books (we have two different books about the movie, and I've read them as bedtime stories at least a dozen times each!). I've also heard just about every line in the movie, quoted to me as matchbox cars vroooomed around my feet.

"I'm faster than fast, quicker than quick. Speed? I AM SPEED!"

Top-rated game for the Five Year Old in 2006? Cars, hands-down. It's a fun little race car game, a bit easier than Dad's favorite (Need for Speed) and eaiser for the kids to master. In fact, I think they've unlocked all the levels and all the race tracks, except the final one -- and that is only a few days away from being unlocked.

Still, like bedtime stories -- it will get replayed again and again, for weeks to come.

Lightning McQueen

Donovan turned five (oh my gosh, where is the time going -- my babies are growing up!), and this is a picture of the Birthday Cake. That's Number 95, Lightning McQueen, starring front and center on the birthday cake. Lightning McQueen is Donovan's latest obsession.

It was a delicious cake, and Tucker (our mutt) can attest to that. He had a nice long lick along the front of it, while the rest of us were outside, and he found the cake just a hair to close to the countertop where we had left it.

What you see is the cake after we surgically cut away the parts that had been left behind from his exploring tongue. Damn dog!! 

Squirt

MEMORIES: We used to have this ENORMOUS styrofoam sailboat at the beach house. I'm not sure how we came to own it, I don't think we bought it. More likely, we salvaged it from other drift on the beach, or perhaps it was given to us by another family who had outgrown it. I'm drifting back to the foggy cobwebs of my memory, I think I was perhaps 8 or 9 at the time.

The sailboat was really just a large, flat lenght of styrofoam, maybe 12' - 15' long. It had a slot in the center for the keel, and a hole for the mast, and a rudder. By the time it came into our ownership, I don't remember we ever owned the sail, the mast, and the rudder was broken off. So truly all we had was a large, flat piece of styrofoam. It was light, and two of us could carry it down from the cottage to the beach easily.

You might question what use a large flat piece of styrofoam might be at the beach. My father used it as ... a bed. It was a sanctuary to escape the both children and spouse, and get away for a time on the ocean. He would push the styrofoam boat out just past the breakers, haul himself aboard and just lay out for a nap.

Of course, then there was that one time when he did more than just doze off ... he fell fast asleep. And by the time he woke up, Higgin's Beach was nowhere in sight.

I doze and take naps on an inflatable float -- this one, that my father is floating on now. It's enough, for now, but I sometimes wish I had my own styrofoam raft, and could sail out on the ocean for a time, lost and adrift.

The Dive

Normally, I might be concerned that my older sister would KILL ME for posting a picture of her arse on the internet, for all the world to see. But I find comfort in knowing my Suzy-Q is a bit phobic of technology, only checks here eMail once every month or so, and probably doesn't even know my blog exists. So there's really little risk in posting it ... ha!

Yep, that's my big sister, showing my neices how to do a ... well, I'm not exactly sure WHAT type of dive you'd call this. I don't think I've seen it in the Olympics before though! I had such a laugh at this!

Under Siege

Nephew Benjamin had his first birthday party recently (ok, it was a couple weeks ago, but I've been on vacation and, well, ya ...)

My baby sister bought one of those inflatable castle-shapped Jump-N-Gyms off ebay (she gets a lot of stuff from ebay!), and her kids got to play around in it for a day. But it seemed to have sprung a leak on the eve before the big party. The leak was cleverly patched with duct tape, proving once again that duct tape is the ultimate, versatile, engineering tool. After several more kids (namely, my three sons) joined the collection of (much younger) kids already inside, however, well ... you can see the consequences yourself.

The hole grew larger, the castle deflated in several different directions all at once, and the walls came tumbling down. Now you can't tell from the picture, but there are actually a half-dozen or so children under that heap. One concerned parent (nice legs, cute butt!) is checking on them, while this concerned parent was taking pictures. That's my oldest son's hand sticking up in the far, left corner. Ahhhh, to be 8 again!

The castle was never the same after this collapse. If all the children vacated the structure, it would fully inflate in seconds, but as soon as 2-3 got back in side, it became a crumpled heap again. Bummer ... I was kinda looking forward to going inside for a tumble myself. Yeah, I'm still a kid.

Happy 1st Birthday, Benjamin! We had fun!!

Hamming It Up For The Camera

One of our Family Rituals is to bring the kids down to The Picture People twice a year. Once in the fall for a family photograph with all of us, and once on their birthday where they can ham it up for the camera and be the special star. I really like the pictures that we get back from The Picture People, and sometimes it's hard to choose which one we should keep for framing.

JPSnotes: I'm not sure why, but part of the ritual is only selecting one photograph for framing, even though there might be 2-3 really great shots in the half-dozen photo's taken.

This is Donovan (or "Don", as he's asked to be called now, in his most serious 5-year old voice) starring in one of the pictures that probably will NOT make the "final pick". I love this shot, because it's so Donovan: happy, go-lucky, carefree, smiles ear-to-ear! If I were as clever as my baby sister, I'd find a way to show my personal favorite in the photoshoot -- but that will have to wait until tomorrow's edition of the PureGemini blog!

PS -- sorry to be so behind in blog entries, but vacations in Maine are internet free, just as vacations SHOULD be! Oh, and SOOOO many great pictures from the vacation, can't wait to publish them here! 

Miss my Mom

It's about a 40-minute drive from work to the cemetery where my mother is buried, a little longer enroute, when you stop to purchase a flower to lay on her grave stone. So a little over an hour and a half round-trip, but I wasn't too concerned about taking a long lunch today.

It was a quiet drive, with the radio off and my mind just wandering. Peaceful, calm.

I wasn't the first to visit this day. There were some flowers and a sand dollar (from Higgin's Beach, no dobut) laid atop her grave marker. I went to move them aside, to lay my palms on the flat stone (a ritual of mine) ... when my world just crashed. When I read the tombstone, it said:

J. Bradford Seabury

Suddenly everything stopped, I didn't quite know where I was any more. "No, that's wrong," I whispered. But the sane, reasoning side of my brain couldn't counter what my eyes were reading and the letters that my fingers traced. Slowly I came around, and read the entire grave stone. I saw my mother's name in the stone, August 8th, 2005 was written near her name. That area near my father's inscription was a blank slate. The world started to slowly turn again, and I came back to reality.

I miss you, Mom. I'll remember what you said, and I'll try harder.

Laughter

 

Launch

Cousin Nicholas is fearless as he launches off the diving board for a dunk in the pool. 

And to think I used to be a Sun Worshipper ...

Through my teens and early twenty's, I worked as a lifeguard, and later as the Water Front Director, at a YMCA Camp near home. If I appreciate my Mother for anything most, it's that she kept me in my weekly swimming classes, and enrolled me in a week-long lifeguard training program when I was 17.

I didn't know what to expect going into the training class. I thought there would be a lot more kids my age there -- but it was mostly adults, except for two other teenage girls my age (Debbie Hackett from Merrimack and Amy Miller from Nashua). I developed a steadfast crush on Amy Miller (which never amounted to anything, regrettably). Debbie Hackett developed a steadfast crush on me (which never amounted to anything, thankfully). The three of us became great summertime friends for that and several summers to follow.

After we passed our lifeguard certification, we all signed up to be swimming instructors / lifeguards at Camp Sargent. What a GREAT job that was. The three of us would spend hours just lounging on the wooden dock between classes -- talking about all the things teenagers talk about. I never once put on sunblock. In fact, I remember slathering baby oil on my skin from time to time, to intensify the tan, rather than use sunscreen to block it. I would get so dark during the summer, you'd hardly recognize my pale-skinned heritage!

Today, I hide from the sun. I'm almost always wearing a T-shirt and hat, and the parts of me that are exposed are screened in the heaviest SPF 45+. /sigh, I miss my reckless youth.