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Michael's Diary Entries Diary Navigation: Choose A Diary Entry -------------------- Latest Entry: 8/28/00 -------------------- 8/21/00 8/14/00 8/7/00 8/1/00 7/24/00 7/17/00 7/10/00 7/3/00 6/26/00 6/19/00 6/12/00 6/5/00 5/29/00 5/22/00 5/14/00 -------------------- Michael's Introduction

June 12, 2000

Dear Readers,

Lisa is now on summer break and I feel out of sorts. Don’t get me wrong. I‘m pleased that she is home but we always stumble over each other the first couple of weeks until we settle into a new routine. But her break allowed us to take a mini-vacation to visit my sister Debbie in Iowa.

Road Trip: Home on the Range
"Oh give me a home, where the cornfields grow, and it smells like cow manure all day." I always sing this version of "Home on the Range" after a visit to Iowa, beautiful, exciting Dubuque, Iowa.

Actually, we had a good time, visiting with my sister, seeing how she’s fixed up her house, playing with Maggie (the hyperactive but incredibly loving Australian cattle dog we gave her), watching movies, playing basketball, shopping and almost swimming. We also learned a little more about the incredible ability of kids to foil the best laid plans.

The Best Laid Plans Part 1: To Swim or Not to Swim?
For Thursday, we had a choice of activities: go fishing on a pontoon boat or go swimming at the pool. We decided on swimming mainly because we thought the kids would like it better, even though my sister and the family we were visiting would have preferred boating. I also didn’t like the idea of having Allison and her high energy, strong-willed self in an ill-fitting life jacket fidgeting and trying to run around a small boat. And if she saw a duck ...

We arrived at the pool and no one but me wanted to go in the water. Allison screamed and refused to go in. We dipped her in anyway, thinking once in she would like it. Wrong. She screamed louder. And Brandon stayed away, though very interested, because of those evil bugs.

As fate would have it, just as we sat down beside the pool, a bee flew over the pool by a four-year-old boy, whose mother started swatting at it and yelling to her son, "There’s a bee, get down, there’s a bee, go under water, darn bee, the bee’s by your head, get down!" There was no way Brandon was going into bee- and bug-infested water.

I wanted to yell, "You’re over a hundred times bigger than the bugs, so knock it off, get in the pool, and have fun!" Fortunately, I simmered for only a few minutes and didn’t boil over. After I returned to normal temperature, I coaxed him over to the edge and helped him have fun splashing and making waves. Well, I enjoyed the water. Yes, I, who can barely swim, who flails in water like a dying fish, swam the most, almost sinking a couple of times from exhaustion and almost bruising my stomach with an improperly executed dive off the diving board. Next time: boating and fishing. And I’m thinking my mom should demand a refund on the swimming lessons she paid for me when I was a boy.

Question: But this raises a question: Aren’t boys supposed to like bugs and creepy-crawly things? Maybe that comes later. He does like dirt and mess outside, though.

The Best Laid Plans Part 2: To Sleep or Not to Sleep
We carefully picked our drive times, scheduling ourselves to drive there at about 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, even though my sister wanted us there earlier, and to drive home at about 2:00 p.m. on Friday. The magic hour of 2:00 p.m. was selected because that’s naptime.

The drive there was great. Both kids slept almost the entire way there (about a three-hour drive). The drive home was another story: Brandon fell asleep about an hour into the drive, but Allison became progressively more irritable, agitated, and whiny, the longer we drove. Ouch, my ears still hurt. The poor child was hot and hungry, because, despite her robust appetite, she ate very little at lunch, choosing to people watch instead of eat.

Welcome Home: To set the stage for a pleasant first night home, Allison fell asleep at about 5:30 p.m., twenty minutes from home. All I remember about the rest of the night is waaaaaaaah!

Taking no dives and making no plans,
Michael