I Speak With the Tongue of a Thousand White-Hot Lies!

So I was perusing Tumblr, as you do, and I found some other photos of this charming fellow on seanan_mcguire's blog there (this one's public domain, so I felt okay about posting it, plus it gives you a better overview of the fish).

This is the sarcastic fringehead, ladies and gentlemen (and if that isn't a name to warm your heart, jkason, I don't know what is). But what I thought, immediately upon seeing it, was Holy cats, that's the thing that chews on Corwyn's leg in "The Drowned Man!"

Well, with less color, and you have to take away the fringe. Add a few inches of length and a lot more teeth. But that's pretty much it. And here I thought I'd made it up in my head.

(If you haven't read that story yet, don't worry, that's a very minor spoiler. And you should go read it.)

For the past couple of days I've been mulling taking Z. to the beach. And not our little tiny strip of local beach, but a real beach. It's an enormous undertaking, much more so than a trip to the park, but with the oil spill in the Gulf ... well, I don't know when we'll be able to go to the beach and have it be a nice day--maybe next weekend, or maybe not for a long time. I just don't know.

Plus, the last time we went to the beach I got massively, scarily sunburned.

So today I decided to haul us out to the touristy beach. I began the preparations by sunblocking every bit of me not covered by my bathing ensemble.* Then I got Z. in a swim diaper and sunblocked every bit of him not covered by it, and got him in his suit.

After a couple of detours, we got to the beach. There's a high bridge you cross to get there, and at the top Z. said, "Is that the beach, right there? I LOVE it! It's FANTASTIC!"

And, after I got cash and change for parking, I discovered that the damn beach finally got parking ticket machines that take debit cards.

Z. was entranced by the sheer tacky tourist hell that this particular area is, and claimed he wanted to go shopping until I reminded him that there was water in the other direction. Then we were all over that.

So we headed down, got two steps off the boardwalk, and my son laid on his stomach in the sugar sand, pretending to be a dog. When he tired of that, we found a spot to put our towel and stuff, got his swim vest on, and headed out to the water.

It was murky, but you could see schools of minnows. We waded out a ways and Z. tried floating on back and tummy, kicking, and sort of vaguely moving his arms in a swimming-esque motion.

Now, it's May. May is sting ray season. Season lasts until October. In my entire life, I have seen one ray in the wild**, and that was on Lover's Key and it was a pancake ray (round like a pancake). But I dutifully shuffle my feet to disturb any rays that might be on the bottom, in the sand, because I remember the summer of my senior year when a girl I hung out with stepped on a ray and, well, it sucked. Still, I've only ever seen one ray in the wild, and I have lived down here for thirty years.

Well, gang, today I saw sting rays. A lot of them. Z. and I shared the water with them. Now, there may have just been two and we saw them a lot, or there may have actually been eight or nine different ones, but every other thing there were sting rays swimming nearby.

On the one hand--stinging things! Near my baby! Who likes to jump up and down in the water! ACK!

On the other hand--my favorite form of sea life a bloody foot away from me! Looking sleek and awesome and fast! And flipping the tips of their wings out of the water! AWESOME!

So we were moving back toward shore, me explaining that we need to drag our feet to Z., and a ray swam in front of us. Then I saw movement to the side of us, and saw a ray swimming behind us. We were surrounded!

Figuring better I got stung than the boyo, I scooped Z. up and made my way cautiously around the rays to shore. We stayed in the shallows after that, but we saw more (or more of the same) rays periodically. One man was trying to get a photo of one, and told us that when he got really close, the ray buried itself in the sand. Z. found this hilarious.

We played in the waves for a bit, then gathered our things, rinsed our feet, and headed for the playground, where Z. ran around while I re-applied sunblock in a fairly OCD manner. Then I grabbed him and re-applied it to him. It takes a while, but I do learn.

Now we wanted ice cream! Actually, we wanted juice from the soda machine, but all I had was a ten, so we were distracted from Mommy-fail by the siren song of ice cream.

Since it was Big Adventure Friday, Z. got a small strawberry sundae and a blue drink (aka the Arctic Blast blue raspberry frozen toddler-crack), and I got a strawberry lemonade. And after about a quarter of it, I couldn't stand it anymore (dear god, the syrupy sweetness of its unblinking eye!) ... and Z. commandeered the rest of it. He was like a little hummingbird, sampling the nectar of three sugary treats.

Surprisingly, he was not that wired when we left. But we had to take the blue drink with us.

So we walked the pier and checked out the little gift shop there. (I think everyone I know needs a coconut purse for Christmas, by the way, so don't be surprised in December!) Then we went farther down the pier to where the old men who fish hang out, and charmed an older couple:

Z: I LOVE to fish!

L: Well, we'll have to get Grandpa to take you.

Lady: Our granddaughter loves to fish, too, and she's three.

Z: I'm three, too!

Gentleman: Want to see the fish I caught? Look in the bucket.

So we looked in the bucket at his fish, then got to see him catch another one, which went into the bucket, too, where the two fish began chasing each other around and around.

We now had an hour left on our parking permit, so we hit the water one last time (after the long walk down the pier, where Z. complained about his legs being tired and I explained that I couldn't carry him and the blue drink, and the blue drink proved it's made of toddler-crack because the kid wouldn't let me throw it away and stopped complaining).

Z. was content to sit in my lap and kick waves ("My feet can defeat them, Mommy!" he said, without realizing the pun) for the most part, though he finally did want to move farther into the water. And when we did, what did we see? Well, we saw three college-age girls in bikinis (one of whom was pretty hot, and made me sorry my husband wasn't there to check her out) who suddenly started gliding their way quickly out of the water.

"Okay, Cathy, that was freaking creepy," said (not the hot) girl, in the age old tone of voice that means, "you're the Floridian and you brought my yankee ass down here without telling me about the stinging wildlife, what the hell?"

"Just keep shuffling your feet," said Cathy, looking--like all of us Floridians do in these situations--both sheepish and secretly pleased.

Yes, that's right, we enjoy it when you freak out over the ginormous palmetto bugs and the alligators sunning themselves outside our places of business. Bwa-hahahahahaha!

A little while later, I saw two more rays zipping along under the water. One of them veered off and started heading directly toward us, so I started backing off--and I swear to god, this ray herded us back up into the ankle-deep shallows.

By now it was time to leave, and that prompted a meltdown. Plus I threw away the toddler crack, so you can imagine how that went. But the boy fell asleep in the car, I managed to scrape up enough change for bridge toll, and neither of us is more than slightly pink. All in all, a successful trip to the beach.

(I just hope and pray we can have another one. And another after that, and so on.)



*a sports bra, tank top, and my bathing suit bottom. The tank top covers most of the area where the worst of the sunburn was, and comes up high enough in the back that I can get sunblock on the rest of me. Until Z. is old enough to actually put sunblock on his old mother, this will be my bathing attire when he and I go to the beach alone. Well, until I can get some cool board shorts.

**wait, hang on. We did a walk-a-thon over a bridge ages ago, and I saw one in the water from the top of the bridge, but I don't think that really counts in the same way.

Because there's accepting a low mood, and then there's wallowing in it--and I'm not quite wallowing yet, but it's getting there.

So. Positive thoughts.

--I found 3T feety pajamas at Target for $3.50! I miss pajamas with feet, so Z. now has two pairs. I am washing those today, baby.

--The sun is coming out! I like gray days when I'm in a good mood--they don't put me in a bad mood--but when I feel down the sun helps a lot.

--The Zweeble's favorite non-kid songs now include "I Wanna Be a Cowboy" and some song by the Reverend Horton Heat. I eagerly await the day he comes out with "My name is Ted, and one day, I'll be dead, yo yo yo."

--Baby Seahorse, Nemesis for Hire.

--I actually saw one of those community volunteer cops doing something, and it was giving a ticket to someone who had parked illegally in a handicapped spot! I was grumbling about the guy blocking traffic in the parking lot until I realized he'd blocked the miscreant in!

--my kiddo snuggled up to me on the couch while we waited for lunch to get cooked.


So those are okay, but I need more. So tell me something nice, y'all three of you. (Just nothing about Xmas, because that's part of what's bringing me down. Thanks.)

Happy Anniversary to doggiesushi and sugarcoatedlie!

And I give you the ZQOTD:

(in his best party-host voice) "Mrs. Kangaroo, you remember my nemesis, Baby Seahorse."