The squirrel humor turned into rabies humor over the past few days. I wasn’t worried about anything until then my mom mentioned a tetanus shot and then my sister said squirrels aren’t a concern for rabies but bats are, and then I remembered all the bats we see flying around outside our window in the evenings and then I started thinking about the rabid bat that most definitely bit the squirrel who then fell out of the tree onto my head and scratched my ear.
Kevin came up to give me a kiss in the kitchen this morning and I turned and savagely hissed at him, my claws at the ready. He keeps asking me how my jaw is feeling and I turn around and look at him, jaw completely frozen in place and say, “Ih hiiiiiiiy.” He says, “Well, at least it locked up in the open position.”
Anyway, rabies really is not funny at all but at some point I realized that I would have had a DTaP shot in my third trimester with Leo, so any lockjaw I’m experiencing now is purely stress related from all this worrying I’ve been doing about having rabies.
Moving right along…a couple weekends ago we went to family camp to preview the camp Vincenzo will spend a week at this summer. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before but my city slicker of a husband is not a camper. He promised me one camping trip a year when we got married, and by my count he now owes me 13 camping trips. Kevin, however, counts it as camping if we stay at a hotel that doesn’t have cable, WiFi, and a mall within walking distance, so he feels he’s put in his time.
It didn’t make Kevin feel any better when I typed in directions for “Camp Orkila” (or-KAI-la) and my phone repeated back, “Finding route to Camp or-KILL-a…” But we already had our ferry reservations by then, and we were going.
Here are the boys waiting for the ferry. Pretty, isn’t it?!
Settling into camp, both Leo and Buzz Light Year were super excited about sleeping in an open-air cabin:
(Buzz was a little less excited when morning came and he was soaked with potty that had grown cold in the night.)
(Leo was still just as excited.)
We played a long game of giant Jenga which we decided must be pronounced “Lenga” (zoom in on the writing to decide for yourself):
We threw some pottery:
I felt that the ceramic hands Rocco made were very realistic:
Vincenzo climbed the tower that he’ll be able to zip line from in the summer:
The boys logged a ton of hours playing some game called “Gaga ball” that looks like this:
Later we came up with as many jokes like these as we could think of:
Q: What do you call a bunch of girls playing gaga ball?
A: Lady Gaga!
Q: What do you call a bunch of babies playing gaga ball?
A: Goo goo ga ga!
Q: What is it called when the band Queen plays gaga ball?
A: Radio Gaga!
And those were the good ones.
We realized Rocco needs to wear a belt with these pants:
We walked on the beach:
And Leo made it through the whole weekend without taking a nap.
Well, almost.
There was so much more that we did and didn’t do—check out the salmon in the environmental ed house, ride dirt bikes around a big course, make bows and arrows out of sticks we found, climb up and caribeen down the climbing towers, join in the campfire skits, completely lose Rocco in the woods for a half hour, shoot rifles, take out a canoe, jump in the pool, eat copious amounts of pasta and brownies. The kids loved camp food so much, they are still talking about it, in fact. Now when I cook something and they tell me they like it, I ask, “It’s good…but is it camp food good?”
I loved everything about the weekend—the smells of the woods and the campfire, the sounds of the ocean and the birds in the morning, my cold nose warming up over a cup of coffee, the kids not able to eat enough to make up for all the gaga ball they played that day, the camp counselors laying grounds for their summer flings with each other, Kevin’s eyes red and swollen from the grass, pollen, campfire smoke, and other campy things they had taken in. I loved not deciding when and what we’d eat and I loved not squeezing things into the schedule. I loved all the memories of my own days as a camper and a camp counselor being gently shaken awake and filling my head with some of my very favorite “Remember Whens.” It was a weekend in heaven.
I do have one complaint to file about the weekend, however: I do not like the fact that Vincenzo is the one who gets to go there this summer and not me. It’s not faaaaaaiiir.
WHAT’S COOKIN’ 2NITE:
Potato leek soup
Homemade whole wheat bread and butter
Spinach salad
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