The Coxsackie Family Vacation!

Four.

That's the number of times I've had to cancel a trip because a child fell ill the day we were supposed to depart. We don't take a lot of trips, so this is a pretty high percentage of total trips ventured. The most memorable of these trip cancellations was when Primo got appendicitis the night David and I were supposed to leave for Iceland. The car service came to take us to the airport but instead we had it take us to the ER where my son got an organ removed. Fun times.

Of course, all's well that ends well. And the most distressing thing about that cancelled trip was that, had my son grown sick just a few hours later, we'd have been in Iceland when he was taken to the hospital. Thinking about him in pain and me far away, waiting for hours for a flight to take me back to him, fills me with tremendous dread. It's enough to make me never plan a vacation again.

But that's no way to live! So we plan. And we inevitably cancel, too. Because, guess what? Kids get sick all the damn time and very inopportunely, I might add.

Two Fridays ago, we were all set to drive down to North Carolinw for our annual family vacation. We meet David's parents and his sister, with her all kids, and grandmothers and family friends and it's a rollicking good time. Sand and surf and sweet tea. We look forward to it all year. The vacation can never come quick enough.

We were all packed. Swim diapers and thermometers and reading material and sunblock and snorkel masks and everything you could possibly need was organized into suitcases and the suitcases were zipped up. Sandwiches were made for the ride down and wrapped in tin foil. Reservations had been confirmed at the hotel in DC where we stay to make the trip a bearable two-day one, instead of an intolerable blur of misery that is concluded in one day.

We were all set. All we had to do was attend the kids' culminating performance at theater camp at 1pm and from there, we'd stick the kids right into the already-packed car and zoom off. But about a half hour before we had to leave to see the performance Terza did something profoundly disturbing.

She fell asleep.

Whenever my kids fall asleep without a fight, I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are sick. It happened when Primo had appendictisu and it was the deciding factor for us to take him to the ER.

"He doesn't have fever or vomiting or the other symptoms," I told David. "But he says his stomach hurts. AND HE JUST FELL ASLEEP. At 7pm. Without a struggle."

"Shit," David concurred, "You're right."

So when I looked over and found Terza lying in the middle of the living room carpet, on her stomach, dozing off, I knew. I knew the trip was a goner. I shot David a panicked look and then he knew too.

But we deluded ourselves because sometimes life requires a little delusion.

"It's not THAT weird," I reasoned. "I mean, it's nap time and so she fell asleep. Kids DO that. I've heard they do that."

David nodded. But he didn't looked convinced. Sure, kids do that. Just not our kids.

A half hour later, after slinging the diaper bag over my shoulder and slipping my sunglasses on the top of my head, fully ready to go to the kids' show and then after that, DC, I picked the baby up from where she'd been sleeping on the living room floor. And of course she was blazing hot.

Now, I don't usually call the doctor immediately after the kids first spike a fever because I know they are going to tell me to wait until they've had the fever for three days or until other complications arise. But in this instance, I needed a prognosis, in order to ascertain if we'd be able to leave for NC soon. So I brought Terza into the doctor who took one look at her throat and made an educated guess that I did not want to hear.

"Looks like Coxsackie," she said/ "Everyone has it. It's going around big-time."

I pumped her for details and as soon as I heard them, I regretted it. High fever for up to 3 days? Ulcers all down the throat making eating and drinking very difficult? Blisters forming afterwards on the hand, feet, mouth and BUTT? Oh, and yes, highly contagious.

"But she might NOT have that, right?" I clarified.

"Sure, she might not," the doctor replied. "But she probably does."

Terza is a very charming feverish baby. She gets positively luminescent. She is super chatty, not unlike someone on coke. She talks about a mile a minute and runs to and fro, until suddenly, she'll crash and then she lies on the couch, eyes all glassy, and says stuff like "I love you my darling." And you just want to beat the germs senseless and send them packing. So she did that and we consoled the kids who were positively miserable that our trip was on indefinite hold. You can say, "Think about your poor sister for God's sake!" but, come on, they're kids.

So we watched TV and ate ice cream with chocolate syrup and waited-and-seed. The inevitably of waiting-and-seeing is the number one reason I will never be a doctor. There are many other reasons, but that's top of the list.

And just about twenty four hours after she'd fallen asleep on the floor with a fever, her fever broke. Mercifully. We would have definitely luxuriated in relief had that not been the exact moment that the mouth ulcers began to bother her. Did I say "bother?" Hmmmmn. There must be a more exact word I can use to communicate the effect of the sores on my daughter. "Tormented" gets a bit closer.

Because while Terza is a dreamboat Fever Baby, she is a nightmare Mouth Ulcer Baby. Not that I blame the poor kid. If there was some kind of morphine mouthwash I could safely use on her, I'd have used it. Interestingly, the pharmacy doesn't have Pediatric Percoset Mouthwash over the counter. So we were forced to go it the Old-School-Suffering route.

And, we figured, since we were all already suffering at home, why not take the show on the road? With her fever completely gone, and a diagnosis fully confirmed, we decided to take Coxsackie Baby on a ten hour drive to the beach!


 . . . . Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion of the Coxsackie Family Vacation.

Road Trip

Sorry for the radio silence but I've been tied up the past week "vacationing." Maybe its really obnoxious of me to use the word "vacation" with quotation marks because after all, I did just spend a week in the stupendous Outer Banks, lounging in the pool and sitting seaside while the kids hunted for clams and made malted sand balls. We saw wild horses and admired the moon path on the ocean and got sand in our butts and salt water in our mouths. That part was all vacation without the " ".

But GETTING there was another story altogether. Driving to North Carolina could not be considered a vacation even with extra quotation marks. The drive was supposed to take around 9 hours and instead took 14. Fourteen hours in a vehicle where the car seats are packed so tightly Primo can't even buckle his booster seat belt because it is underneath Terza's infant car seat base and only David, a highly trained specialist, who can basically detach his hand from his wrist to reach under, can handle it. Fourteen hours with children suffering from volume immodulation disorder (and regrettably, the volume is immoderately high, not low). Fourteen hours of fighting over whose turn it is to play 20 Questions, which song we should listen to, which DVD we should play on the DVD player that David and I bought thinking it would eliminate, not instigate fights. Fourteen hours of "I'm hungry!" and "I'm car sick!" and "She hit me!" and "You're not invited to my birthday party!"

And that's not even including the baby. 

The baby was actually the only easy going personality in the car, and for the first day of traveling, when we went to DC, and hit only a little bit of traffic, the baby was actually very smiley and patient and accommodating. But on the second day, when we checked out of our hotel in DC and headed straight into the heart of darkness known as Driving To The Outer Banks on Check In Day, well, she was just fed up with the whole scenario. And who could blame her? But the waves of infant screams emanating from the back seat were enough to cause permanent mental damage on all of us. 

The second day of driving was just a clusterfuck in general. Traffic everywhere. Diaper Explosions constantly. We had to stop every ten minutes, either to change a diaper, breastfeed the baby, console the baby, bring a kid to the bathroom, get some food or just escape from total insanity. So, although we only drove or 9 hours that day, we were on the road more like 12. The worst part was the total gridlock that we faced before we crossed the bridge to cross over to the island. The cars just wouldn't move, for hours. Finally, we crossed the bridge and I made David stop so I could nurse the baby and then I refused to get back in the car. 

"We can't go on," I said. 

"Nicole," said David, "we're like 15 miles away."

"Yes, but with the traffic, that's like another hour. I can't. I just can't."

"So what are we going to do?"

"We will just have to stay overnight here. In the parking lot to Kitty Hawk Elementary School."

"What is Mommy doing?" asked Seconda. 

"Mommy's having a nervous collapse," I said.

"What's that?" asked Seconda.

"She's just feeding the baby." answered David, "Give her a minute."

Of course, I got in the car and took deep breaths for the last hour it took to get 15 miles. And when we pulled into the driveway of the rented hours, twelve hours after leaving DC, my in laws said we were just in time for pizza. 

"We ordered it two hours ago but it just got here, with all the traffic."

And just as I was beginning to recover from the drive down, our vacation came to a close and we had to brave the drive back. But that is a lamentation for a another day.  Today, I'm just luxuriating in stretching my legs. 

Hunter

In North Carolina, my daughter learned how to catch animals and eat them. Sea creatures, primarily. She had an absolute LARK of a time fishing for blue crabs, watching us shake them into our coooler of doom, where they would freeze to death, and then asking when she could slurp them up. The next day, we did, indeed, steam the suckers and she cracked off their legs and sucked them into her gullet. Eating crabs has never seemed so violent. Then it was all about the oysters.

"I'm going to crack open their shells and slurp them up!" She could hardly wait.

While playing on the beach, she found a ton f teeny tiny crbas, each the size of a quarter, which she promptly captured for a later meal. When we told her they were too small to eat, she decided the next best thing would be to keep them as a pet. And how she loved those dwarf crabs, for a whole fifteen to twenty minutes.

I am a little concerned that her hunting zeal with continue now that we're back in the Big Apple. I half expect her to come to me with a dead rat or cockroach that she'd like to broil for supper. Its tough to acclimate to city living again after the great outdoors.

Why I am an octogenarian, on the inside

My cousin’s friends came to visit her while we were all at Terracina, a little beach town about an hour south of Rome. They are all early twenty-somethings, single and totally unencumbered.

We were having coffee the morning after they came, and the girls wandered into the kitchen, bleary-eyed, and smelling of smoke.

“What’d you guys do last night?” I asked, ever the interested cousin.

“We went for a swim,” said the dark-haired one.

“Oh, cool,” I replied. I took a sip of coffee and continued to show my interest in their lives: “Did you go in your clothes?”

“No,” the blonde said.

“Oh, so you wore your bathing suits?” I persisted, for some reason very interested in the logistics of this late-night dip.

“No,” said my cousin.

“Oh,” I replied, my head dense as a block of Parmesean cheese, “But if you didn’t go in your clothes or in your swimsuits then what . . . . “

The girls looked at each other and smiled, exactly as if they were talking to their very obtuse grandmother and debating whether or not they should really explain the concept of the skinny dip to her.

“Oooohhhh,” I said, mortified, “I get it now. Right”

What am I, a Mormon? Am I a hundred years old? Has it been THAT long since I ran into the ocean buck naked?

Man, oh man, two kids in two years does age a girl. No doubt.

Pain in the . . .

I went to the beach over the weekend and I did something ill-advised. I decided to forgo sunscreen. The sequence of events that led to this mistake were as follows:

1, Our SPF 70 spray-on sunscreen was running on fumes and I, ever the martyr, wanted to save the last for the children.

2. I could not be bothered.

3. I kind of believed that because it was late August, my skin had built a certain tolerance to the harmful rays of the sun, even those emitted at high noon at a beach.

4. It was partly cloudy and I hold the belief, which is, of course, completely erroneous, that if the clouds are there, the sun cannot get through and one cannot get sun burnt. This is tantamount to believing that you can not get pregnant the first time you have sex. It is idiotic. But sometimes I’m an idiot.

So now, guess who has a scorched backside. As if I needed another pain in my ass.

Franks and Freaks

Nothing says summer like a day at Coney Island. Eating franks and shooting freaks. Handing over your ticket for the ride. Sipping ice-cold lemonade. I heart Coney. We all heart Coney. How could you not?

Of course with the new development that’s underway, it may not stay so easy to love. But when we went yesterday, we were relived to find that though there were some absences – the go-kart places an batting ranges which used to be on Stillwell Avenue have been pushed out to make way for Thor Equities’ Festival by the Sea – most of the Coney faves were still standing, for now.

Since Primo is suddenly anti-sand, David and he stuck to the boardwalk while Sec and I got gritty. She played in the sprinkler on the sand for a while and then on the playground, where she removed her hat and dumped an entire pail of sand on her head.

“Let’s run to the ocean!” I said, fun-loving, footloose mama that I am.

And we ran, me and the girl holding hands, and splashing in the freezing water and laughing. I was literally in the process of thinking, “Why does everybody complain about this beach? It’s clean! It’s totally clean!” when a Park department guy wearing an orange shit blew his whistle at me.

“Get out of the water!” he yelled.

“Me?” I asked, incredulously.

“Yeah, you,” he replied, with an unspoken, but crystal-clear “knucklehead” implied.

“We can’t go in the water?” I pressed the point.

“It’s contaminated,” he replied, no beating around the bush.

Oh,” I said, surprised, “With what?” It didn’t make a difference what the answer was really -- contaminated is contaminated and I wouldn’t have let Sec stay in if the risk factor was sewage rather than a deadly parasite. Still, I was curious.

But the man was already blowing his whistle at someone else.

So I dragged Seconda out, literally kicking and screaming and we headed over to meet Primo and Pops at the kiddie ride area, where Prim was riding Dizzy Dragons.

My son is the most serious-looking amusement rider you will ever encounter. He loves to ride, he thrills to ride, he can’t get enough of rides, but if you saw him on a merry-go-round, or sitting in the belly of a spinning clown, you’d think he was trying to figure out the theory of relativity, he is concentrating so hard. I mean, his brow is actually furrowed.

When he’d used up his three allotted tickets, we left the rides and treated ourselves to “freshly-squeezed lemonade” on the boardwalk, in the spot where the fabulous Lola Staar boutique used to stand (you can find her now at the Brooklyn Flea).

“We’ll take a small.” I told the kid behind the counter.

“For two dollars more you can get a large and get free refills,” was the counter offer.

But I’ve been to a movie theater or two in my lifetime and I know how to decline the up-sell.

“The small is fine,” I said, handing over $3.

The kid placed a small cup under a metallic hand-cranked juicer, where a half-lemon was pre-placed. He pulled the lever and a few drops of juice accumulated in the cup. Then he poured these driplets into my cup, placed it on a shelf beneath my sightline, and then, five seconds later, handed me a full cup of “fresh squeezed lemonade” which tasted suspiciously like Crystal Light.

“Everyone is a shyster on the island of Coney,” concluded David.

Shysters or not, nobody nowhere nohow makes a frank like Nathan’s. So we chowed down, David with his Coors and chili cheese dogs, the kids with their corn on the cob and me with fries on a pitchfork. The Beatles were right. Happiness is a hot dog. Yum yum chomp chomp.