Falling under the category of "How to get exhausted on vacation without really trying," I planned a "less than twenty-four hour" turnaround to take my family from the picturesque snowy mountains -- home, and then up at the crack of dawn the following day -- to catch a flight to Oahu and the North Shore for the second exciting week of Jack's winter break. I would have fired my travel agent except that the person was me!
Added "perk" to the stress was me slipping on black ice at a gas station as we were leaving the mountains. If the card-reader at the pump had worked, none of this would have happened. If I had been carrying Makena into the gas station to pay in person, she would have taken my full weight as I slipped and crashed to the ground. I guess that was the miracle, A) that I wasn't worse off than a severely bruised elbow, B) that I wasn't carrying the baby.
Needless to say my little 4.7 double axel (for artistic impression) shaved four hours off my travel turn-around budget and poof! Gone was the time I had allotted for the pre-trip manicure, pedicure and waxing. Thank God, I packed Mak and Jack's luggage and Santa's presents, the week before. I didn't have to worry about forgetting something key. Unfortunately, I ended up shaving and butchering my legs and wishing I'd had a more "European" approach to body hair. Do you really need to know this?
Anyway, the kids were All Stars and behaved charmingly on the flight over. I discovered that sucking on ice chips and punching the numbers on the seat-phone were Makena's favorite pass times. Jack actually said "please" and "thank you" to the flight-attendant, learned how to play Solitaire and let me sit in the window seat with Makena while my husband fed me Advil at regular intervals to help the swelling go down on my elbow.
When we got to Haleiwa, we all happily discovered that the rental agent had slapped some lights on a plastic palm tree. Jack grumbled that it wasn't a pine tree so I hastily explained that eight-pound, 6 ounce, baby Jesus (quoted from Talladega Nights) was born in the Middle East and that I suspected that the original Christmas Tree was actually a palm tree. Ha! Am I good or what?
This was the first time we weren't going to be home for Christmas and Jack was really concerned that Santa Claus wouldn't know where to find him. I assured him that I had mailed his letter to the North Pole with a forwarding address but he was very skeptical and moody. My brother and sister-in-law suspected that Jack's distress was an act meant to extract more gifts and that he didn't really "believe." They actually challenged me to confront him about it (They don't have kids) and for a while it felt as if I was living an episode of "Curb your enthusiasm" because they kept bringing the topic up. It was quite funny and nerve racking at the same time. Ultimately, is was a big "No way" because I wasn't going to be the one to pull Santa's sleigh out of the sky.
A hasty trip to Foodland provided us with some cheap colorful ornaments to hang and I would have added Leis to the trimming but my brother-in-law asked me not to embarrass him with the purchase...So I bought the National Enquirer instead and read it in plain view, in the check-out aisle, as we waited to pay. Now that was embarrassing!
Aloha.
Isabelle
No comments:
Post a Comment