My great-grandparents, owners of a shoe shop, were among the first to buy land on Hilton Head Island, SC. They built a glass-walled treehouse there between a lagoon (home to an alligator!) and a golf course.
Across the lagoon is a row of houses, and then the beach. (Links go to videos I took in those spots).
Though the water was cold, we had fun by the shore. My husband, the Swede, was the only one who swam.
Some other nice ones:
The last time I was at the beach, I was 31 weeks pregnant pregnant, and about 6.5 weeks from birth.
Now we are almost 7 months post-partum.
I love my life now. I adore my baby. Everything she does is delightful and amazing. Baby is so easy (now–I seem to recall things were different the first few months, as is the case for many, and things were especially hard before we got into the groove of exclusively pumping) that I am out of practice with sort of sleeping difficulties that arose, not unreasonably, on vacation. I think I melted down more than the baby. I sure had a lot of apologizing to do to my mom in the morning.
Basically, on the way there, she slept the two hours to my mother’s house, was awake and charming for a visit to her great-grandparents’, and then slept one and a half hours part of the rest of the way to the beach, after which she spent another one and a half hours screaming her fool head off, tired of the car seat, tired of sleeping. That evening, when I was already very frazzled from the drive, the poor confused thing screamed and screamed, until finally, exhausted from the histrionics, she snoozed by my side through the night. It was actually cozy, the co-sleeping–it had been months since the last time. And for the rest of the trip I got her to sleep in her little porta-crib, including her usual 12-13 hour night stretches. So I really have nothing to complain about; she’s such a good sleeper, though, that one evening of staying up past bedtime, with good reason, totally unhinged me. I really feel for the mothers of bad sleepers.
We timed the trip home a little better–three hours during afternoon nap time, two hours after bedtime. You know, I seem to remember, pre-Baby, having been derisive of people who made travel plans around their children’s schedules, but now I know I was just being an ignorant ass. I’ll drive any old crazy time of the day if it keep the crying away.
We’re so lucky to have that place. My mother works very hard taking care of that house, my grandparents and their home, my step-father’s father and his home in Tennessee, her own home (she has an incredible English garden), my Baby once a week in a town two hours from her, my yard (embarrassingly, she’s the only one who really does any yard work around here). I wonder if, when I am middle-aged, will I suddenly be such a productive, helpful person? When I am done with my time-consuming lactation efforts, will I suddenly have to start doing something around here to keep the place up? (My pride requires me to mention that I do make regular efforts in the housewifery department, but don’t live up to my mother’s standards of, for example, window-cleaning protocol).
Oh, and Baby’s eczema totally cleared up at the beach, even though my mother kept trying to slip Baby various food items–like banana chips that had been in a bag with peanuts (!) and sugary yogurt, and broccoli in Hoisin sauce. I’m worried now that my filthy, furry house is causing the skin problem. Or maybe it was just the fresh air and sunshine–we were outside so much.
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I still haven’t gotten any kind of thank you from my friend whose wedding I did not attend, not even verbally even though we’ve spoken, for the wedding shower I threw. This hurts.
Also, the bride seems to be having some sort of let-down reaction to post-wedding life (aka marriage). I think she expected some sort of magic-happy transformation now that she’s got two diamondy rings on her fingers instead of just the one, yet things have remained the same. Especially since she lived with her husband for five years before marriage, and didn’t take a honeymoon and instead returned to school and work as usual, and still isn’t combining finances with her husband or looking into buying a house together, I don’t really understand how she thought things would be different.
As far as I can tell, the only change for her is that they’re no longer using condoms. I’m so used to infertility that I can only look on in amazement at her certainty that she doesn’t need to look for work for after her May graduation, since, of course, she’ll already be pregnant then. Oh, the simple planning of the (ostensibly) fertile.
Even if there were upheaval in her life after marriage, that doesn’t change the truth of who she is in her relationship, in my opinion. Even for me, who didn’t co-habitate before marriage, and married mere weeks after graduating from college in Rhode Island and subsequently moving to Georgia to a new home, to a new job (being a nanny–so glad my family spent all that money on university so I could work under the table in childcare), who indeed had a honeymoon (at the Hilton Head beach house, as it happens), I was still myself when a wife, my husband still himself as a husband. We were still the same as a couple. I don’t believe marriage does anything to a relationship other than perhaps changing how some react to you–the social sanctioning of living together, of having children, of sex. If I weren’t so darn southern, and my mother so darn religious, I wouldn’t be married. Besides, Swedish people are very reluctant to make things official. It’s a miracle I even got an engagement ring.
