Why is it that whenever you are about to go on vacation, your job goes totally crazy and you can barely manage to get outta there alive. Actually, I am not *quite* about to go on vacay but I put in some of my week’s hours on the weekend and I will squeeze out the rest of my 40 for the week by working remotely from various places, some more exotic than others. I won’t try to describe my “guinea pig” project of the last five days or so (reading about it would be like watching paint dry) but I wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote again and rearranged and went through several internal reviews and a big “cast of thousands” review today. And then there were all of the typical post-review negotiations. Because I was doing a guinea pig sort of prodject, there was even more than the usual confusion and dissent and, when I was done presenting, the LSCHP suggested I should go get myself a beer!

The good news? At the very end of the day, 10 minutes before I was planning on leaving, I overheard a conversation about *my* prodject in a certain neighboring office. So I crashed the party. Of all things, I found myself taking sides with a very valuable but, uh, well, sometimes “difficult” person and together we managed to convince a person that I *usually* side with that we were heading down the wrong path. I got outta there very late but it was worth it. Knock on wood that it won’t all come back to bite me in some weird way. It probably will but I am going to celebrate this small success.

So, how about those waves? Would you let your six-year-old kid swim in that storm? There’s that tow-head again, aka meeeeeee, yer fav-o-rite blahgger >wink< The geography of the moominbeach is one reason why this photoooo represents an okay scenario. We are on a shallow bay (12-13 feet deep at the most) and there is a sandbar system near the shore. Two sandbars and the water in between the two is rarely more than waist deep on me as a medium height adult female. You can tell your small beach urchin, “Don’t go past the second sandbar” and they usually won’t. There’s plenty of stuff to do between the sandbars when you are small. There is no undertow! My old coot held the opinion that the island in the middle of our bay (not shown) prevented undertows. Whether that’s true or not, I dunno but there isn’t an undertow so, even with those big waves, swimming was pretty safe and us kids learned early how to play in those big waves.

Oh yeah. We are absolute *fanatics* about water safety up there on the moominbeach. When you are a kid, you do NOT go swimming without asking an adult to watch you. It is totally absolutely utterly verboten. You learn that at a very early age. The good news is that you can always find an adult who *will* watch you. Even if it is so cold enough that they have to wear a winter jacket to sit on the beach. When I became totally fanatic about being clean as a teenager / 20-something, I had to bathe in the lake (no hot running water or shower in the cabin and yes I did wear a bathing suit (don’t ask)). I remember that I would often ask The Comm to come down to the beach if it was really windy. Just in case. And she always would.

As a moom, I cannot count how many hours I spent sitting on the moominbeach counting heads. My two kids and whichever first and second cousins were in the water. Wait, where is Mouse? How many heads were out there? Did I lose count? Oh, there she is. Coming down from a bathroom break at the moomincabin (or maybe sneaking a snack before 3:00). Whew! All I have to say is that lifeguard is a very hard job.

Missing those days… Being a kid on the moominbeach and being a moom on the moominbeach. Good times.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.