Last in the Rat Race

Spring Break 2010 – Texas

Day 1
Arrive in Dallas: Almost die 5+ times in rush hour traffic skirting downtown. Much talk of getting tossed from car. Permanent hand-prints on dash. F-bombs. Kate cries then falls asleep.
Arrive at brother-in-law’s house: Beer, please. (need a Vicodin, but Bud Light will do). Turn Kate loose on cousins. Much screaming (of the little girl kind. three of them.)
Dinner: BEST CHILE RELLENO EVER. Fell in love with Matt. Considering moving to Dallas.

Day 2
Depart Dallas for Austin
Drive through Waco.
Wonder what horrible atrocities kids commit to get sent to Baylor.

Arrive in Round Rock and detour for Salt Lick Bar-b-Que as seen on Man vs. Food.
Lunch: BEST PULLED PORK TACOS EVER. Want to lick the salt lick. Lick fingers instead.
Arrive in Lago Vista and deliver Kate into the arms of Gammi.

Afternoon: MRA golfs. Kate, Gam & I fly kites. Literally. (lessons learned: you CAN get a kite out of a tree, it just takes three generations maneuvering; Kate would rather pee in the woods than in a port-a-john… can you blame her?)

Dinner: Bam’s – home of the stuffed burger. (not worth a link)

Day 3
Loose track of days.
MRA golfs, trade off kid/g-ma, then KDA shops. ALONE! Glorious, except for the fact that the shops were totally disheveled – quashed my high.
Dinner: home-cooked, good, but not Mexican or bbq

Day 4
hm… lost a day somewhere here (I think there was a bouncy house involved and a golf store – you can see why the memory escapes)

Day 5
MRA golfs.
Kate, Gam & I head west to Marble Falls and south to the Exotic Animal Resort. Holy shit. They load you up in a wagon, give you a bucket of food and turn the animals loose on you. We can now say we have hand-fed:
Camels

(Yes, Kate’s hand was fully INSIDE the beastie’s mouth at one point)
Llamas
Deer
Bison
BISON!

More deer
Emu
Ostrich
Yaks
Zebra

All without the coverage of a liability waiver. All without my little almost-four-year-old listening to the instructions. “Do NOT hand-feed the zebras as they are the only ones which might catch a finger. Just throw the feed on the ground.” (note photo above: Kate listens well, yes?)

It was amazing. So close to so many animals. So many varieties. So much slobber. I can now describe what the tongue of a bison feels like. Jealous? Did I mention the slobber?

Back home – with a stop at the Blue Bonnet Cafe. (Eating my way through Texas…)

While the girls napped, I grabbed my book and a beer and headed outside for a little sun. Vacation rocks.

Dinner: The Pier in Point Venture. A total wreck of a joint with crappy food, but you can’t beat the views, it’s fun to sit on a floating dock/restaurant, and the dinner entertainment was, well, entertaining.

Kate is feeding the catfish some left-over chips.
(hm. guess that’s my beer in the frame. i don’t even want to know what that black stuff is on the dock.)

It’s hard to get a true sense of what’s going on here, but there are AT LEAST 50 catfish swarming the dock, and many are the size of my child. A little disturbing? Does the sun rise in the east?

Everything is bigger in Texas.

I subscribe to an e-newsletter from 20×200, a great website for finding cool stuff to hang on your walls (w/o breaking the bank). The other day, they posted work by Mike Monteiro, and this one caught my eye.

I had to send it on to MRA. It’s our relationship. It’s a quote from a Lyle Lovett song.
What could be more perfect?

In my office, there are a number of us flirting with 40. The men are fighting their battles silently. (let’s be honest, they’re not really affected until they’re nearly 50.) The women? Not a day goes by without someone complaining about the weight creeping up on them. On the scale, on their ass, on their thighs. It ain’t pretty, but the commiseration (today over b-day cake) is comforting.

In a lame attempt to fight back, we have a small group who started out with a noon Pilates instructor. After cycling through at least 7 different instructors, we were left to fly solo. (After a session or two, they would, unfortunately, realize that their time was more valuable than we could support.) Ever game, we started dusting off and contributing various workout videos from home (remember the early ’90’s and Cindy Crawford’s “Complete Workout?”), and have worked in a number of light strength training options.

Today? The day AFTER St. Patrick’s Day… HA! Good one.

Mindy – never one to turn down a beer – was more than slightly hung over, but let me talk her into working out. Mindy talked Justine – who was also nursing a Red Headed Slut hangover – into it.

We sat down on our mats to lace up our sneaks and stretch.

Mindy never got back up.

As Justine and I were gutting it out, our little friend napped. NAPPED! No amount of ribbing or shaming would pry off her mat where she comfortably rested, face down, for 50 minutes.

Her punishment?
The waffle effect left by her mat on the right side of her face was priceless. A badge of honor for the rest of the day.

MRA picked Kate up from camp last night as I had a late meeting. (Interesting, in my world these days 4:00 IS late… late when it doesn’t involve meeting my graphic designer out for cocktails… but that’s also a story for another day.)

Arrived home to find this on my living room carpet.

On those crazy days when Kate’s school is semi-closed (and semi-working parents are able to take their kids out for a little spring, summer or winter fun), there is a thing called “Camp” at school. It’s a loose term meaning “corralled chaos” at school. Or “after care” but before and during, too. Camp is fine in that it allows Kate to play with the other unfortunate classmates who are struggling to rise out of the slums of dual-income households. All three of them.

Again, it’s fine. The minor drawback – no hot lunch. That’s right, my kid is a hot-luncher. More accurately, I’m not much of a pack-a-lunch-in-the-am-rush fan and frankly her school lunch program is the bomb. Farm-fresh, direct from the farm, still mooing, dirt on the leaves kind of food. Lunch packed at home would be yet another thing to plan for, worry about, and potentially forget in the morning.

Yesterday, first day of Camp for this week, I sent Kate to school with a sunbutter and jelly sandwich. Feeling pretty studly, I inventoried the pack – sunbutter (no peanuts or derivatives – learned THAT one at summer Camp), jelly (homemade, courtesy of Aunt Neva who, bless her, still lives on a farm), whole wheat bread, skim string cheese, frozen organic yogurt tube, apple (yes, she ASKED for the apple) and a small packet of rainbow Goldfish (yick).

When I picked her up from school, she was famished, already talking about eating her sandwich which she said was still in her lunch pack. Not so, kiddo. The only thing in there is your toy T.Rex which I shoved in there while we were walking out of the building. Hm… She made do with the Cheerios staple we keep for the daily ride home.

At home, she again asked for PB&J and I was happy to oblige. While making the real deal (REAL peanut butter this time) she told me about how no one at camp was allergic to peanuts, but her teachers still threw her sandwich away.

Here’s where I became unreasonably angry and offended. (this is AFTER I picked up a kid who was clearly misbehaving at school and maintaining that attitude in the car. where was the heavy hand at school to shove her back in line? too busy tossing out my lovingly crafted sandwich, thank you.)

Calm. Peace. (I know I’m being unreasonable. They have a bevvy of kids to care for and I didn’t declare the spread “PEANUT FREE”… although the smell is a dead give away. ick)

Her lunch had been packed with stuff to eat – enough that she didn’t go hungry. More than anything, I think I was just a little offended that they didn’t trust that I knew better. I KNOW better.

Today’s lunch? The same. This time with a note in the sandwich bag: SUNbutter & jelly

We’ll see what happens today…