Isobel is smart. Yeah, I know that all parents say their kids are smart but Izzy really is. Like scary smart, like evil genius kind of smart. Like the kind of smart that if she didn't have Barbie, the world would tremble at her Dora slipper clad feet. She stood unassisted quite early and, though we got her a tricked out walker, she really didn't use it for too long. She spoke early, though I don't consider it early, she just hadn't anything to say up until that point. She learned to dress herself at quite a young age and reveled in playing dress up, a skill that has not diminished in the slightest since that day. Hell, she even knows who Einstein is, he's the guy with the wiggly head in Night at the Museum part two.
Now we often get gifts of clothing from some of the other mothers that share the babysitter. We aren't poor or anything but why spend wads of cash on clothes that won't fit in three months when someone else's mother already has. Isobel will take these bags of treasure and dutifully go through them item by item and sort them into two piles, for keeps and give backs. After which my wife will go through both piles and decide which items are actually fit to be worn in civilized society.
So when we got a bag of bathing suits the other day, I had no doubt that Izzy would try them on and determine which ones were right for her. She made mention of a coloured one that had boobies, (a bikini) a purple one that didn't have two pieces apart (a one piece, still with me?) and then she found the one that spoke to her, a snazzy pink number.After she had it on she came over to me looking a little dismayed and said,
"Daddy, this one doesn't have a top."
"Look around, it has to be there somewhere. I don't think we would get only half a bathing suit."
Ok," she said and walked back over to the couch.
And as she headed back to the swimsuit covered sofa, I could clearly see the four year old bum through the hole that would normally house the four year old lower torso. Found the top...
I love to travel, a love I came to traveling with a band. Roaming up and down the highways and bi-ways in a vehicle packed with stuff or climbing aboard an airplane jetting off to an exotic locale. More to the point, I love to travel with my children...really. My kids are the kind of kids you dream about traveling with, especially on a plane. The are quiet, polite and for the most part, are able to occupy themselves for the entire journey. I have heard "are we there yet?" only twice that I can ever remember. And despite photographic evidence that may seem to the contrary, I love to vacation with my kids. It's what it is to be a dad. When your stepson crushes himself into you because he is absolutely shitting himself with the possibility of the gondola breaking on the way up Blue Mountain and all of us plummeting ten feet to certain doom, the family vacation fun has officially commenced!
But Mexico is the place I think, that means the most to all of us. All of us have very fond memories of our little villa by the sea and we try to go there as often as we can...never often enough...Izzy was still quite young the first time we went and still required a daily nap and I was the only one she would nap with for whatever reason. Sometimes it was a complete inconvenience and interrupted whatever I happened to be doing at the time, most of the time it was a blessing and now that she doesn't take them anymore I miss them.
We had been at the beach all day, as was our daily ritual. I mean if you're going to Mexico in the dead of Canadian winter, you want to spend every waking moment soaking up the sun. Even the kids got this one quickly. Nap time had arrived and Izzy was ready. In fact, she had been kind of cranky all day. When I carried her back to the villa, she wasn't as chatty as she usually was but again, I didn't think much of it. I was quite tired too and was looking forward to a little shut eye.
"Are you tired and sleepy tired?" I asked and as I did I noticed she had chocolate around her mouth. I set her on the counter and reached to get a cloth to wipe her mouth. As I did, Izzy began to cry. Not the cry of a baby that was overtired, I had become much too familiar with this one.(oddly enough it is eerily similar to the crying of an overtired daddy) No, it was a different cry, one that portrayed a betrayal by one's own body. A cry that said "this is not the way I should be feeling because this is not how I felt an hour ago, why the HELL is this happening to me?"
I leaned down to face level to ask her what was the matter and she vomited and I just wasn't quick enough on the draw. Now I am no shrinking violet, I have seen and done many things in my life that would make a great deal of people run for the hills. That being said, I was totally unprepared for the sensation and experience of my little girl throwing up not on me, but directly into my mouth. Yes I said it and I wasn't kidding. She vomited directly into my "what's the matter honey?' asking pie hole. I spit out as much as I could but I know I swallowed a little.
Shortly after this everyone else came home and I was temporarily relieved of duty to go and sterilize myself..inside and out...but it was really just a matter of time. Anybody that came with a hundred feet of Izzy got sick. By ten thirty, the boy was puking himself into dry heaves and screaming for mummy to come, poor kid I didn't envy him. As a direct result of tending to the boy, mummy was struck down by about midnight followed shortly by the father-in-law, who went down for the count about a quarter to one.
By about two o'clock, after hearing somebody shuffle to the bathroom and ask what was left of their dinner to leave their stomach, I was thinking myself pretty lucky. I actually ate vomit and it appeared I was going to come out the other side unscathed... Oh I am fortune's fool. By tw
o thirty I was pacing the room with that familiar feeling of impending doom. I wasn't sick but it was in the mail. By two thirty one and seventeen seconds I was dashing for the bathroom hoping I would make it. By two thirty two I was glued to the seat clutching the trash can for dear life begging it to stop on at least one front. It didn't. In fact, it went on for the better part of our last week there. My father-in-law and I got hit the worst though we did manage to salvage the last two days of our second week. Mummy and the boy were virtually done with it the next day, still a little out of sorts but otherwise ok. Isobel slept for about three or four hours after delivering a street pizza into my mouth and then was completely well. My mother-in-law was the only one that never got it. Izzy did always like her best.
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