OK, now we are really home. After my wonderful three weeks in the Bay Area, I was in Ridgecrest for five days, just long enough for me and the babies to get stomach flu and be horribly sick. Then on Friday we all drove up to June Lake, in the eastern Sierra very close to the eastern entrance to Yosemite, for a long weekend with some of my cousins.
And now that's over and we are home. It feels a bit more like home this time. It was actually less than 100 degrees when we drove into Ridgecrest around 2:30 pm today, 97 degrees to be exact. By the time we reached our house, it had gone up to 101, but still, that's better than 111. There was an ant invasion in the kitchen, but that's California. There were only a few dead cockroaches on the floor (or maybe I haven't looked closely enough).
It's supposed to be "cool" all week -- highs around 100, even less than 100 some days. I can hardly believe it. I wonder how long it will last. I've been wondering how we were going to survive August. Maybe it will be possible.
I wanted to write about my earlier vacation. The babies and I spent a lovely three weeks in the Bay Area in July, while Rocket Boy stayed in Ridgecrest and worked. We rented a two-bedroom condo in Palo Alto right across the street from a little shopping center with a nice grocery store called Piazza's, a Peet's coffeehouse, and a heavenly ice cream shop. The condo was small, but the perfect size for us. One of my sisters gave me a one-month subscription to the San Francisco Chronicle and the other gave me a gift card for Peet's.
Each foggy morning I was awakened by the babies' cries around 6:30 or 7:00. I would give them each a bottle, step outside the condo in my nightgown and pick up my newspaper, then go back inside to brew a pot of tea and scan the headlines. After getting dressed myself, I'd get the babies changed and dressed, and then sit them in their highchairs for breakfast. While they ate and/or threw their food around, I'd eat my cereal and continue reading the paper, always finishing up with the Sudoku and the Jumble and the Cryptoquip (though sometimes I'd have to wait until night to do them all). The Chronicle is a shadow of its former self, but it is better than the Ridgecrest Daily Independent. Then I'd get the babies down and do a little cleanup (though I usually saved the dishes for evening -- the condo didn't have a dishwasher), and then I would announce "Let's brush teeth and get shoes and socks!" The babies would follow me to the bathroom to "brush" their teeth -- it mostly consists of sucking on the toothbrush at this point, but they let me brush their teeth a little and they watch me brushing mine. Then we would all put on our shoes and socks and go out for a stroller ride. We were about a 15-minute walk from Mitchell Park, which has a great little kids area, not too much changed from when I was a little kid. The babies loved playing there. On other days we would go to Piazza's and buy some fruit or milk, or maybe stop at Peet's for a latte, or just walk through the neighborhood, getting our exercise (me) or our nap (the boos).
We would be back at the condo by 9:30 or 10:00 for our snack, a scone from Peet's or a cut-up peach from Piazza's. One of my sisters would often show up around then, and we would get ready to go to a library for story time. We managed to hit story time at five different libraries (in Palo Alto, Los Altos, and Menlo Park). After story time we usually went to my sister's house in Los Altos for lunch. In the afternoon we might visit another park. I think we went to 10 different local parks while we were there, plus we went on excursions to some bigger parks further afield -- Rancho San Antonio County Park, which includes a small farm with animals, and Oak Meadow Park in Los Gatos, which has a train and a carousel.
Most nights we stayed for dinner at my sister's, but once or twice a week we would go back to the condo and have something simple like scrambled eggs or ravioli, and sometimes my other sister would bring takeout. I'm not sure I ever put a baby to bed by myself -- a sister always came to help. Then I would stand at the kitchen window doing the day's dishes, watching the sky get darker, watching the last shoppers at Piazza's hurrying to and from the store with their cloth bags, watching the workers shut the store down.
Going on vacation with two little ones is never going to be easy, but this was about as restful as it could have been.
It already seems like a long long time ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment