The kiddies are sharing a room while we're at The Sandbox this week (we have a completely unoccupied room for the next day and a half, if anyone is interested!). I heard lots of giggling coming from their room, and suddenly there is an eerie silence. My only hope is that they are so completely passed out from our big day, and everyone is alive.
This is the first night they've been in bed before 9:30 since we've been here. Phew.
(The eternal worrying freak, I just went in their room and did a death-check. Everyone is in their separate sleeping areas. No one is dead.)
And it WAS a big day. After an early morning run, where we encountered the largest, most alive snake I've ever seen, sunning itself in the middle of the road, we hung out under the carport and did some swinging while Heath and Stella ran trucks up and down the drive. The wind came a-blowin', and some clouds rolled in, so we decided to make a day trip in to Wilmington to check out the NC Azalea festival.
We wandered around the river front and had some lunch outside. More insanely hungry seagulls hovered above us, waiting to hit the jack-pot that lay beneath Stella's high chair. She was mostly interested in taking one bite from a french fry, then dropping it on the ground. My salad had a hard-boiled egg that I split between Heath and Stella. One bite. Drop. While I was busy reprimanding Stella for her food-toss game, Heath was busy shoving the mushy, yellow yolk between the wooden planks. I want to see it drop into the water, he explained. Oh, well, you want to see it drop into the water. I pointed out the Please Don't Feed the Seagulls sign. He closed his eyes and said, I don't see it.
More post-lunch meandering on the cobblestone streets. I saw a few azalea bushes. We saw our friend, Michael, who does the horse-drawn carriage rides. (Heath became his buddy last summer when we were visiting.) And Stella made her acquaintance with a fellow sitting on a bench busily making sweet grass baskets. He made her a lovely flower. She tried to swipe his knife.
"The Peacemaker" pirate ship was the big attraction of the day. It's really not a pirate ship, but don't tell Heath. Apparently it's owned by the Twelve Tribes: The Commonwealth of Israel. Heath and Mark managed to get a pretty decent tour, but Stella was in no mood. I got her on the ship, but our stay was brief. She didn't want to walk. She didn't want to be carried. She wanted to climb steps to the top level, but didn't want to budge past the second step. The line backed up and I told her she couldn't just hang out on the steps. She kicked her shoes off. Some man stepped on her hand, and she of course went crazy, pinching at his bare legs. He looks at me like I had some rabid-mad-dog baby with me. I finally dragged her off the boat to wait for Heath and Mark to finish. I, then, proceeded to ruin her next good time of trying to climb under some staging area that I later found out was set up for the Goo-Goo Dolls concert. (They're still a band?)
Port City Java was an excellent place to take a load off and have some Mango and Strawberry smoothies. They have a little reading library set up, and Heath was able to sit back and catch up on a Richard Scarry book he's never read before. I want to take this home, he said, after reading it two times. He was a good sport about that not being an option. Unfortunately, I can't remember the title. It had something to do with Mr. Frumble's pickle car crashing. Stella befriended a woman sitting on the couch beside us, trying to do some work on her computer. Apparently she has a nineteen month old boy. She seemed slightly interested in an arranged marriage, showing us multiple pictures of Aiden, telling Stella how much she and Aiden have in common: running with sticks, food, being busy and screechy.
I don't want to leave on Saturday, and I really don't want to get sad about leaving on Saturday when it's only Thursday. Guess I'll watch The Office, eat ice cream, and figure out a way to move to Wilmington or Southport.
I found a really cool Richard Scarry book in a coffee shop in Atlanta. Every wall of the coffee shop was a huge bookshelf filled with 25c second hand books being sold to raise money for a local elementary school. I bought the book because it was unlike any of the other Richard Scarry books I'd seen before, it wasn't one of the Scarrytowns, and I absolutely loved the illustrations in it. We read it to Sam a few times and one night it got overlooked and left in his bedroom with him. Big mistake. I found it in pieces the next morning. Not just in pieces. It was in pieces and soggy, turning into papier mache in part. Yes. It had also been peed on.
ReplyDeleteI'd been intending to use the retro illustrations as inspiration for a crafty something or other so I hit up the internet to find a replacement for myself. I was devastated and in shock when I found out that it was a very rare edition and the cheapest I could find online was over $100. To cap it off, when I checked the remaining shard of inside cover of my copy, it was a first edition.