A Day at the Beach

I did it again Friday morning (the 17th of July); I turned the darn alarm off and thank goodness I woke up when I did or else Mario would have been LATE. He woke up with just enough time to get dressed.

I lazied around and then got ready to go to McAllen. Mary was still off that day so we were going to meet Mario for lunch. It was already passed 12:30 so I texted him and he told me he wasn’t going to be able to have lunch with us since he was working on a Jeep and was going to end up having a late lunch. Oh well :(. We took off, went to the bank and all that jazz and then met at Taco Bell.

The kiddos ate well, including Alaethia even though she didn’t finish her whole taco. I’ll take what I can get with my picky girl, though. I was taken by surprise when one of the cashiers said he knew Mario and that he was family of Mario’s boss. I thought he looked familiar.

We didn’t get a chance to see Gramma that day since Noelia was coming over to get her nails done by Maggie and just as we were leaving Taco Bell she called that she was at the house. Uh-oh. I took Mario some food and then we came straight home. I tidied up while Noelia held Emily and the rest of the kiddos lounged around I the living room. By the time I knew it, it was 4pm and I had to get the boys ready for TaeKwonDo and Maggie still wasn’t here. It was when we were at the Dojo that she let me know she was getting her light set up at her house so she wouldn’t make it. They’re finally moving back to their house! I’m just sad that they won’t be as close and we won’t be able to chill out all the time like we used to :(.

I was really hoping to get back and have Margaritas with the girls, but oh well. Since Noelia wasn’t getting her nails done she went to the Dojo to see the boys in action. They’re doing extremely well now that they’ve been separated. Luis, their instructor, is incredibly patient. He does a great job with the kiddos, even with the little hyper boy that’s always jumping around LOL. Eenan’s class is joined by the Yellow Belts on Fridays but each group still got their individual attention. Eenan has the first half of his White Belt Form down pat! He was so proud of himself that for the first time since they started going to class he seemed excited about Karate. He even said, “I’m going to get my Yellow Belt by the end of this month!” I hope so :).

We got home and Mary tells me to pack because we’re going to the beach, along with Andy and Noelia, the next day. I’m sort of not really feeling it, because Mario’s got a sale going on at work and I knew he wouldn’t be able to go. I hate going places when he doesn’t go. Not only do I feel guilty, but I feel…unsafe. But I start packing anyway; the kids’ swimming suits, including one for Emily, aw. I am in no shape (literally) to wear a bathing suit, so I just got some shorts and a tank together and another set for afterwards. At least I could work on tanning my arms and legs.

Mario was tired from work (my poor love) and I had to be in bed early so I surfed the web and he watched TV and then we all got ready for bed. I went to bed around 12:30-1am, which was still really late. I woke up around 3:30 with this excruciating pain in my ear, jaw and gums. My stupid Wisdom tooth. I couldn’t go back to sleep from the pain and conceding that I was going to have to get the darn tooth (or perhaps teeth) removed much sooner than I’d planned. I had two options:

The first: get my passport and get the tooth/teeth removed in Mexico and spend about $400 doing everything. The downside to that was probably getting an infection and my whole mouth becoming gangrened and loosing all my teeth or something awful like that.

The second: suck it up and give Elda a call and find out if her office does monthly payments. I’d get it done here and I’d most likely have a safe/clean extraction. The downside: spending a few thousand bucks, I’m sure.

So I thought about my teeth and then I tried to stop thinking about my teeth because when I dream of teeth people die (those who’ve been visiting me long enough know I’m SO telling the truth).

I started thinking about how Mario wasn’t going to go and started getting bad feelings about the whole trip and was already planning to tell Mary we weren’t going. I don’t know how to swim, so as much as I love the ocean, I’m terrified of deep water. I’m even more terrified that one of the kids’ll go too deep and get swept by the current and I can’t reach them. All these creepy thoughts went through my mind.

Then finally, around 5:30 I fell asleep, only to be woken up by Emily at 7 for a feeding. I went back to sleep for about half an hour and then got up to call Mom and take a shower. I got the last of the things packed up, made Mario breakfast and then got the girls dressed and ready. Mario left to work and I felt a pang of guilt/fear. But I willed myself to push the bad feelings away and to just have a good time. It was Emily’s very first trip to the beach, after all.

We packed all our stuff and kids in Elda’s truck, which we were borrowing since all of us didn’t fit in m Equinox or Mary’s Sentra. We stopped for breakfast at Burger King where I spotted a beautiful hummingbird!

Of course we were moving and in the truck so I couldn’t get a very good picture.

We met Andy and Noelia at their apartment and then we all drove to Walmart where they were getting some stuff. We were off on our hour 1/2 drive after that and since I didn’t sleep very well I kept nodding off. It felt like we arrived in 20 minutes to me LOL.

It was around 10 or 11am and it was already scalding hot outside. Gotta love South Texas weather, not. We got all our junk off and found a huge umbrella to rent. We slathered sun block all over the kids first, then ourselves. Mary helped me since I was holding Emily and then I passed her to Noelia so I could finish up.

The older kiddos started off with sand castles of course. I just sat and watched them and held Emily. She was hungry so I fed her and then she started nestling herself against me to fall asleep.

It was nerve wracking keeping an eye on all three kids once the boys started getting brave enough to dip themselves in the cold ocean and Alaethia played in the sand. I passed Emily on to Mom and she and Mary took turns with her while I stayed with the other kids. There were so many people!

Noelia and Andy took the boys to the first and second sand bars and Andy taught them to use the boogie board. I took pics from the shore while I watched Alaethia making sand castles. I was, again, nervous as heck watching them out there but I knew Andy and Noelia would keep an eye on the boys.

Alaethia picked shells with Mary while I sat with Emily, who’d fallen asleep and was all sprawled out on a chair LOL. She looked so cute. Somewhere around here we ate sandwiches and then Andy convinced me to go out to the 1st sandbar with them to pick shells and be with the kids. I went for Alaethia after a while and she behaved amazingly. I was afraid she’d try and jump into the water on her own but she was too busy looking for shells. I found my very first live sand dollar! I had no idea the little guys were a reddish-pink color!

I went back several times to dump our shell collections into the bigger sand pail. Andy found several hermit crabs for the kids! I totally intended on bringing them home and looking for info on saltwater hermit crabs. We have the land ones, but I imagine their diet and habitat are much different!

Mary told me to tell the rest that we’d be leaving soon. I said okay, and relayed the message. While I was walking back I saw a family huddled around each other looking at something. I snooped to see what it was and they showed me their handfuls of sand dollars! They told us to sit where they were and look for them. The kiddos all stayed on the sandbar while Andy, Noelia and I dug our hands into the sand and unearthed tons of little sand dollars. It was a breeding ground for them, but most of them were already dead :(. Andy told me how to bleach them to make them into those white sand dollars we see at the shops. I’m totally going to scrapbook them!

We went back to our umbrella and started putting all our stuff away after that. Mom didn’t get in the water or the sand at all so she stayed in the truck waiting while we got the girls washed up. Mary’d accidentally bought a pack of bad water bottles (they tasted like plastic) so we washed the girls with those and left them in the car with Mom while Mary, Noelia, Andy, the boys and me went to shower and change.

It took the guys a good half hour to get in and change, and that’s because they didn’t even have a line to wait in. It took us–I’m not kidding you–an hour and a half to get through the line and finish up. Didn’t help that the 2 girls in front of us ended up letting 3 more relatives cut in! I was so mad I asked them if they were all going to go into a stall together and they say, “Oh no, of course not!” And I proceed to tell them how cutting isn’t cool and how unfair it was to everyone else that they let them in. They gave the excuse that it was their first time “here”. Um, too bad. It’s rude in general to do that. So they ended up letting us go through, buahaha.

It felt good to wash off all that salt and sand. I was SO SUNBURNED! I didn’t reapply sun block half-way through our time out there and neither did Andy, so we looked like lobsters LOL. We went to the gift shop in Los Fresnos.

Since it was such a last-minute trip and I was on a budget, the boys each got a cute message in a bottle with sand and fake gold in them. I got Mario some alligator and ostrich jerky (yum!) and got a sponge, extra shells and a little hut for my hermies back at home.

It felt like forever before we got home and when we finally did it felt so good to be here. The kids had such a blast! We were going to go over to Jorge and Maggie’s that night but I was so sleepy and sunburnt that we just stayed home and chilled out here.