As my wife and I strolled the cozy little streets of downtown Fernandina Beach, there was a moment when I think we both turned to each other and blurted out, “Where’s the baby?!?” That’s normally a running joke with us. If we go out to lunch sans the 2-1/2-year-old, someone will inevitably stop to ask where the kid is. “Oh my gosh,” one of us will say, hands clasped to face, “where’d she go!?!” or “I told you not to give her the car keys?” Sometimes people laugh; sometimes people call 911. It’s a mixed bag of reactions. But this time it didn’t feel like a joke. It really felt like we’d lost her — like we didn’t know where she was. “Um, didn’t you have her?” Here we were, a whopping 50-plus miles from St. Augustine, spending our first night EVER away from her. We felt naked, and it was kind of unnerving. A part of us — an important part — was missing. It felt weird, kind of awkward and almost like a guilty pleasure. Were we guilty of something?
Laying Down Floors in a Tampa ‘Furnace’
It seemed like a winning proposition: Head down with my brother to my mother’s house in Tampa and lay more than 700-square-feet of hardwood floors in her upstairs. She was paying us a substantial fee and promised to order us carry-out food until our intestines resembled manatees. Yet, somehow it sounded too good to be true. Too simple. Too easy. Too lacking in major complications the kind that are either life-threatening or get you sent to a special hospital where you try to work out why you’ve suddenly taken up eating wallpaper. Two little details had seemed to escape us (or maybe we had blocked them out): 1) the only way upstairs was a narrow spiral staircase; 2) the upstairs, like the downstairs, was un-air conditioned. And because heat rises, the second floor sucks up heat like a vacuum, collecting it in scalding corners that every so once in a while erupt in jets of scorching flames. As my brother and I stood there surveying the scene that first morning — the temperature already hovering around the boiling point of iron — one of his shoes caught fire. We watched as the sweat emerged on our skin and then instantly evaporated, forming thunderstorms in the appropriately named “sun room.”
Don’t You Dare Take Away Our Flip-Flops
Did anyone read about a new assault on Florida’s official state footwear — the flip-flop? That’s right. You heard me, the flip-flop. It stems from an American College of Sports Medicine study, which found that the quiet, unassuming flip-flop can actually lead to lower leg pain and a change in stride if worn too often. The college was careful how they worded their press release, and I appreciate that. No condemnation of the footwear, or calling for its outright ban. No, they understand the hornet’s nest they would have walked into. The picketing, the angry phone calls and maybe even riots. You can take away our guns, our voting rights and maybe even processed cheese snacks, but I’ll be damned if you’re going to take away our flip-flops. Not here. Not in Florida. You’ll have to pry them from our cold, dead hands.
Someone Please Explain the Endlessly Rechargeable Toddler
Have there been many major scientific studies looking at why children, and especially toddlers, have so much energy when they consume so little food? Where does it come from? Do they eat batteries? There has to be a good explanation. And I know this isn’t a new question. It’s been debated for centuries, maybe longer. What drives them? Where do they draw the incredible flow of juice that lets them run about the house until they conk into a wall and knock themselves out? There are plenty of ways to burn off that energy. One friend mentioned she’s taken up running her child in the backyard in the evening. I picture a little dog track, but instead of a plastic rabbit chase-toy, a dangling cookie or a bag of sugar. I remember a night on the way home that my wife turned to me and said she was going to take our two-and-a-half-year-old outside and let her run wild in the sprinkler until she tired or completely pruned up.