Re-entry

The memories of the ten days of fun in the sun I spent in Mexico were quickly erased on the return from Cancun. Makena should have slept at least two hours of the five hour flight home according to my calculations. She drank bottles, ate her food, read her books but would not go down nor sit still. Any time I tried to coerce her to recline she would scream... Sometimes those screams turned to tears... Sometimes they went back to laughter... She was hysterical in every sense of the word. Highlights included ripping the head covering off the seat and tossing it at the passenger behind me. She went on to assault him with my dinner fork, an ice cube and one of her Playmobil toys (I left it behind on the plane). She would simply not shut up or slow down. She had to babble loudly and constantly, so much so that I thought I was losing my mind. Jack managed to nap through this but that act seemed to drive her mad. She crawled onto him and then managed to headbutt him -- hurting him and herself in the process -- and then I had two crying children.

A woman tried to help me by letting Makena watch a DVD and that lasted the whole of two minutes. Another dad gave her some squishy light-up toy that distracted her for all of thirty seconds and then she tossed it at the flight attendant who was not amused. I got zero service from him. Zero eye contact, just a cold shoulder and a glass of warm Chardonnay that did nothing but give me a headache. At one point, I was so desperate for relief I asked him if he had any mini parachutes with built in GPS tracking devices. I told him that I would be glad to toss Makena overboard and retrieve her in a couple of hours. He couldn't even manage to pretend to be amused. Let's just say that I was not flying the friendly skies.

Makena finally did fall asleep (predictably) as the plane touched the ground. I watched as three hundred passengers (my guess) filed past me, none of them making eye contact. If I had cringed any harder my head would have disappeared inside my chest and stayed there, I was so embarrassed.

This great idea to stay on in Mexico for five more days after EM returned to work was a fiasco. Granted, Club Med was fab and beautifully renovated in a very grand "Legoretto" way but I didn't really love being greeted with a mystery cocktail and then made to wear an i.d. bracelet. I felt like I had just walked onto "The Island" and Ewan McGregor was going to tell me that my brain was going to be harvested for some bimbo on "Days Of Our Lives." Nevertheless, my Guatemala travel buddy showed up with her son and we did have a lot of fun hanging out, watching our boys play ping pong, and trying to keep Makena from drowning.

Because when it came to playing in the ocean, nothing excited her more than having a wave crash onto her and being dragged back into the water. It was horrifying. All my efforts to give her a sense or prudence when it came to bodies of water seemed to make her want more. Chlorine, sea water, or sand did nothing. She didn't cry, she laughed. It was truly maddening and not one bit restful.

I did manage to hire a baby-sitter and escaped for a morning of fun the last day we were there. We took the boys to Wet n' Wild, a water park five minutes from where we were staying and bought ourselves a swim with a sea lion. We got there early and watched as fifty tourists ahead of us were lead to the dolphin tank while the four of us stayed back for what was essentially a private forty-five minute session with this hundred-and-fifty pound sea lion named Jenny. It was awesome.

http://www.ktvu.com/news/10332241/detail.html

Okay, so maybe there was a reason everyone went to the dolphin tank.


Is- not prudent, but Is-a-tanned!