Water of the Melon

Let's talk about watermelon.

I had awesome plans of throwing this watermelon in the ocean to teach my kids how to play watermelon polo.  But then I forgot that I had planned that.  We ate it for dinner instead.

I remembered about watermelon polo after we'd eaten the entire thing that night.  But I didn't think that playing with just the rind would be as much fun.

Plus, maybe sharks like watermelon rinds.

Speaking of kitchen tables, we don't actually have a good place inside the house for ours.

But that's okay.  We've figured out how to make it work.

 
And, being able to have this much fun at dinner knowing that the entire apartment looks just as disastrous as the slice you can see?  I love it here.

We'll play watermelon polo another time.

Feeding the Masses

 My grocery shopping buddy and me

I'm a once-a-week grocery shopping kind of girl.  If I set foot in a grocery store more than twice in one week, it's a sure sign that something is off kilter in my little world.  This truth must be so in my life because I find it almost impossible to stick. to. my. shopping. list.  And, since I am a passionate budgeter, this can turn into a bit of a problem.  (Could I really just pick up a bag of lettuce for dinner when that bunch of asparagus is making googly-eyes at me?  And when those peaches, those peaches!, smell so divine? Oh, and I am out of strawberries, too.)  So, instead of coming out with a $3.00 receipt, it reads $24.73 (but, I do get to smell peaches on the way home).

This, combined with the fact that my family could consume a large garden of vegetables, an orchard of fruit, a granary of wheat, and a ranch full of meat every week, makes these weekly shopping trips rather colossal.  As in, two carts full of food, colossal. Which has always been just fine... until we moved into an apartment located on the 11th floor.  I just simply do not have enough arm length to layer that many grocery bags up and down them.  And... even if I did, my strength would come up... short.

So, the kids and I find ourselves just 'running to the grocery store real quick' now-a-days.  And, with the grocery store just 4 blocks away through traffic-filled streets, I've found it only takes a few extra minutes and saves a whole lot of stress to put on backpacks and walk.  This works well because it significantly limits the amount of things I can buy!  That carton of ice cream doesn't look quite so tasty when you have to rush it home through 95 degree heat.  (Don't worry... Brian has made sure we do not have an ice cream void by dropping into the store on his way home from work occasionally.)

The amount of food I have to haul up to this apartment is getting a bit worse, though... it seems we've created another monster.

I'm not sure what it is about our genes, but our babies eat.

And eat.

How many people does it take....

And eat. 

And then they turn into children who eat even more.  And eat.  And eat.  All of them. I might never have known how much they eat without having (secretly) watched other kids and their eating habits.  In our house, there is no such thing as 'adult' portions and 'child' portions.  Each plate holds about the same amount of food.  School lunches are something to be laughed at, happy meals are out of the question, and my 9 and 6 year olds have long stopped ordering from the kids' menu at real restaurants.

Oh, he looks so sweet and innocent.  But there's a food consuming monster lurking in there...

...that never seems to be quite satisfied...

At least I have some helpers to take over feeding duty once in a while...

Now I have to figure out how to get even more food into that elevator (and out of the elevator, and down the hall, (and down the next hall (and down the next hall)), and through the door...).

And, I'm not even going to think about how much food my teenagers are going to consume.

Crocigators

Have you ever watched a youtube video of an alligator or crocodile attacking a large mammal?  It's... chilling.  On a completely unrelated note, we took our four small children on a day trip to the everglades.

Brian was almost drunk with anticipation of finding a wild crocodile.  Or alligator.  He wasn't picky.  Did you know that southern Florida is the only place where alligators and crocodiles live in the same ecosystem?

We were just about ready to hop on an air-boat to go traveling through the mosquito-ridden swamplands in search of one of the reptiles when TK protested his hunger.  Deciding I'd much rather feed him in the comfort of our car vs. on an air-boat traveling through the mosquito-ridden swamplands, we found a small, seemingly deserted dirt road off the beaten path and started driving down it while TK filled his belly. 

Not three minutes into our detoured excursion, we found this guy sitting on the side of the swamps.

"ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!" Brian screamed as he screeched the car to a halt and threw it into park in the middle of the road.  He grabbed the camera and jumped out the driver's door to snap some proof of our find.  This next picture is not zoomed... he got this close...

The children wanted desperately to follow Brian, but I quenched that hope before the full sentence was even expressed and told them that being fifteen feet away inside the car was close enough.  And then I let them roll down their windows as a compromise.  The crocigator (?) seemed quite uninterested in his audience and eventually sauntered away.

"Did you SEE that?!" Brian said as he slid back into his seat.  I love seeing him excited like that...

Within a few minutes, dark clouds started rolling in and added a creepyness to our fun little jaunt through the everglades.  Soon, the rain started pelting down on our car.  And then the rain started sheeting down in buckets.  And then the lightning started flashing right on top of us and made us clench our muscles in nervous excitement.

"You should send a text of that picture we got of the crocodile!" Brian requested. (Though, after some later research, I'm pretty sure it was an alligator because it's snout was more U shaped and less V shaped.)
I pulled out my phone and tried... "No reception."
We drove for a little while longer, eyes wide with excitement and car filled with anxious silence (but for the pounding of the rain on the rental car we were driving (turns out two cars cannot merge into the same lane at the same time (which is a whole nother story that you should ask Brian about sometime))), watching the wipers fail time and time again to create a clear view of the dirt road ahead.
"You know what this feels like?" I asked Brian as I took in the eerie atmosphere, smelled the new car smell, and after I had turned around to see the kids faces pressed up against the windows, searching for man-eating reptiles.  "What?"
"Jurassic Park."

He threw his head back in agreeing laughter.  I love seeing him laugh like that...

For the next couple of hours the rains slowed and poured and slowed and poured, but when they seemed to be gone completely we decided we had had an amazing, perfect day in the everglades and didn't want to finish it off with an air-boat ride that would probably just let us down, with how much fun we had already had. So we finished driving the deserted dirt road, taking in more of the surroundings.

Everglades, we will be back.  Please show us just as good a time next time...

Settling in to Heaven

I do not bounce out of bed in the mornings.  I've tried to change this about myself ohsomany times, but it seems to be a hard and fast, unbreakable law for me.  As strong a law as gravity... I do not bounce out of bed, just as sunblock dropped from the tenth floor will fall and eventually crash onto the pool deck (and explode, in case you're wondering (and scare you to death if you happen to be swimming down there with your kids)).  But a miracle has happened...  Ever since we moved into this new place of ours, I bounce!  Out of bed!  At 6:30 in the morning!  I love it because at around 6:45, this happens:

Quite an amazing start to the day, in my opinion.  And it happens every. single. morning.

Our first few days here were spent unpacking.  Living out of suitcases (or boxes in this case) has a tendency to turn me into a savage animal, so the unpacking process was intense, all-consuming, and then finished within four days (largely finished within two).  Our unpacking process was a little bit difficult because it became apparent very early on that, if we wanted to be able to spend any amount of time in our apartment, all of the stuff we brought was not going to fit.  So, we rented a storage unit and went through all of our things (again) to decide what we really needed, and what could be stored for a year.  While I was busy with the boxes, I realized yet again what an awesome thing it is to have this girl as my first-born.  She kept everyone else happy and pulled out the peanut butter when things got really bad.

Here are five other reasons we love this place (notice, I didn't say the top five reasons... because that list would look like this - #1 Ocean  #2 Ocean  #3 Ocean  #4 Ocean  #5 Ocean - which would make this post quite short, and relatively uninteresting.  Especially since I haven't really taken my camera down to the ocean much, so I wouldn't even have any good pictures to sparkle it up with.):

#1 - We found out about $.99 pizza night

and the kids were happily surprised to see the slices were bigger than their faces.

We had a little bit of excitement when an old lady fainted on the sidewalk.  Brian jumped to action and helped out until the ambulance arrived, and I taught the kids about the manners they should practice of 'not being nosy', while hypocritically snapping a picture from my hip.

#2 - Jumping in the teeny-tiny pool

Brian feels accomplished because he can lie flat in the water and touch one side of the pool with his fingertips and the other side with his toes.  I feel accomplished because I can sit on the side, read a book and keep an eye on the entire pool all at the same time.  (Though, I spend a healthy amount of time playing tag in the water as well (the it-man changes almost as frequently as blinking because there really is no room to run away).)
 
#3 - The beautiful, clear water of the ocean

The water here is in.cred.i.ble.  And, surprisingly different from day to day.  Yesterday, for example, there was seaweed surfing the giant waves and getting trapped up on the bank.  Today the ocean looks like a crystal clear lake, hardly moving at all.   Sometimes the water looks green, other days blue, some days yellow.  It's been fun to get to know the different personalities of the ocean.  But, the greatest thing, in my opinion, is being able to see through the water to the sandy bottom below.  We've seen tiny fish and big fish, a manatee (!) and some sort of something that terrified the snot out of me because everyone panicked and rushed out of the water (and screamed for everyone else to do the same).  It looked like a pack of three small sharks to me, but when I went online to see if I could find out what they were, I had to stop because all the pictures of sharks welled up a deep and intense fear that I've been trying to suppress since I've been here... okay, let's actually back up a bit and end with: and a manatee!

#4 -  Storms

We learned early on that, if a storm blows in on you while you're playing on the beach, just hunker down and sit it out.  So far, the storms have a fun pattern of coming in, hitting hard, sticking around for about five minutes, and then moving along their way.  Carson stood in the storm he's in above for all of 2.7 seconds before the wind literally scared him back inside the house.  He was afraid of being blown away and would not go back out.  That, and the rain was pelting him so hard it felt like little needles.  You can kind of tell how fast the wind is blowing by seeing the streaks of rain travel across his shirt.  My shutter speed was 1/200.

#5 - Fireworks from our balcony

 Not the best picture, but I love the kids in this one.  Carson could. not. stop. jumping for the entire show... he loved it. And Brian and I kept turning to each other with gaping mouths that, had they been articulate at the moment might have said something like, 'how the heck did we get so lucky?!'  (Because that, apparently, is what I come up with when I have time to think about being articulate... ahem... Anyway) It was a fantastic Welcome To The Beach.  The whole day was fun...

We started out watching our relatively quiet beach fill with people.

And then, we stood mesmerized the whole day watching them.  I've always enjoyed people-watching, but this took it to a whole new level!  We could hear their laughter and smell the cook-outs, we watched the pelicans soar back and forth with the wind and spent hours watching the parasailers do flips and tricks off of the waves.

We watched a movie together and were happy to find out that Timothy enjoys television as much as the other kids.

After the show, we played Pictionary out on the balcony.

And laughed big belly laughs at the wind.

(Carson said, 'Kenz... you look like... like a big woman'.)

Eventually, the sun set and we waited anxiously for the city fireworks to begin.  Right. Outside. Our. Window.

So far, this living-on-the-beach thing has been way more than we'd ever hoped it would be...