Jake and Mom waiting for the ghost tour to begin Probably the neatest thing we did during our beach trip was attend the Spring Ghost Tour at the Chestnut Street Cemetery in Apalachicola. The Chestnut Street Cemetery has graves that date back to the 1830s. …
Sophie doing a little hula hooping on the deck. I just wish I’d framed this shot a bit better. On Friday night at the beach house, Sophie and Matt watched an NCIS marathon. I tried to watch with them, but I immediately fell asleep. The …
What could we do with Jake but bury him in the sand?
Jake was so funny at the beach house. Well, I guess he’s always funny. Whenever anybody accidentally cussed, Jake would repeat it, with a big, merry grin on his face: “Ooh, you said ‘sh!+’! Mommy, Rob said ‘sh!+’! Stop cussing, Rob!” he’d say.
“I got it from you, man,” Rob would counter. “You cuss like a drunken sailor.”
On our first day at the beach, Jake kept wanting to play “a little game of Webkinz,” so he and Kris played. I came in a little later and joined the game. And the game was so typical, so very Jake. This was the storyline: Baby Elmo kept farting, blowing the other Webkinz off the bed. Kris was playing and rolling her eyes.
Jake has a very short attention span. The Webkinz game lasted about five minutes, and then: “Hey, Mommy,” Jake said, “do you want to ride bikes now?” And then he forgot about that and said, “Hey, Mommy, how about we play a little game of four-square? . . . Hey, Mommy, do you want to go to the beach?”
Kris had told Jake he could pick out a present for himself while we were at St. George. So when we went to the souvenir shops the first day, he found about 10 million different things he wanted: a boogie board with a skull on it, T-shirts, a stuffed turtle. . . . Jake always gets kind of panicked when he’s shopping. He seems to think he needs to shop quickly before his bankroller backs out of the deal. At Two Gulls he found a little toy and Mom said she would buy it for him, and Jake was saying (nervously) to Kris, “Mommy, this totally doesn’t count as my present, okay? It totally doesn’t. Hum is going to buy me extra things.” (Jake calls Mom “Hum.”)
We went to BJ’s for dinner on Friday night. BJ’s is this little pizza place with a game room attached. Jake sat at the table for about two seconds, and then the rest of the night he was in the game room, gambling his money away. (He can’t resist those games with the tricky, annoying claw that’s supposed to grab a toy for you and never does.) He’d come back to the table briefly now and then to try to get a little more money out of us. At one point he sat down beside Matt with the saddest, most dramatic look on his face and said, “Okay, I did something that wasted my money. I put two coins in a machine and they got . . . ‘stuck.’ . . .” He made unnecessary/nonsensical air quotes around the word “stuck” just to make things more dramatic. And so Matt gave him 50 cents.
Oh, Jake was certainly entertaining at BJ’s. He’s such a high-spirited, sweet little spazz. He was all out of breath, gambling. And when he did sit down to eat, some hot cheese slid off his pizza and into his lap.
We always have so much fun at BJ’s. I got a big basket of fat, puffy breadsticks, the best breadsticks I’ve ever eaten, and Bunny beat everybody at air hockey. Jake did, in the end, win something from the claw: a terrifying shocking pen. Rob got shocked by it. Jake got shocked by it. I was really scared of it. I kept hiding it, and Jake would say, “Where’s my pen? Hummy, where’s my shocking pen? I want to shock somebody with it!” And we’d all shrug and smile, but then Mom would scold us, “Oh, we can’t hide his nice pen!” And she’d give it to him, and he’d end up chasing somebody around the table with it. (Mom likes to spoil Jake.)
Jake being very good (for a moment) in Apalachicola
Sweet Sophie
Kris and Jake have the cutest, closest relationship. They’re like an old married couple, always together and always kind of getting on each other’s nerves. Several times they were seen walking side by side on the beach, happily bickering, both rolling their eyes, Jake making air quotes. Jake is such a drama queen.
This weekend my family and I took a trip to St. George Island, just about an hour and a half away from home. We stayed in a beach house and rented bicycles and collected sand dollars and wore flip-flops and ate too much birthday cake and had a great old time.
A few new pictures:
My new old tray table in the sun room. I got it at Out of the Attic in Tallahassee.
Here I am in the cilantro patch. Doesn’t the bolting cilantro look like Queen Anne’s lace?
Another shot of the Swiss chard. I can’t get over the way it resembles stained glass.
We hid eggs, of course, at Kris’s Easter party. This is not something we do just to entertain the kids. We grown-up Kimel sisters actually love hiding and finding eggs. We like hiding them in the most picturesque ways …
On Easter Sunday, we all got together at Kris’s house. Everybody contributed food for lunch. Bun brought perfect empanadas stuffed with black beans and butternut squash; I brought oven fries, kale, and red bean dip …
Babs refused to open her eyes for my picture.
Yesterday our little cat Babs had to go to the vet, and I was really worried about her. I was so glad when she got home all right, and I fêted her with catnip and treats and a can of Fancy Feast. Babs is so loyal and trusting and forgiving, such a good friend. She’s so endearingly messy. When I got home from work she came running to me with a spider web on her nose.
Often when I’m feeding Babs, Rob will say, “Look, she doesn’t even want any food. She just wants to be friends.” And it’s true. Babs loves companionship. She likes to sit by the pond with Rob and watch the goldfish, and she likes to sit on the warm driveway with me; I’ll give her treats and pet her. Even when she’s reveling in catnip, she’s very gentle and careful with her claws. She likes to lick my hand.
Milan Kundera said dogs are our link to paradise, but I think the same thing could be said about cats: “To sit with a cat on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.”
