Firsts

It's a week old now, so I'd better write up our adventures on our trip to North Carolina before I totally forget what happened. 

Besides our fun with GeePee, we had a pretty good time traveling by car with Sam.  She's always been a fairly easy traveler but, of course, car trips at this age can be difficult.  We brought the Da-vi-da, which is the way we say "DVD player" when we don't want Sam to know what we're talking about.  (I'm sure she knows exactly what we're talking about.)  We didn't use it on the way down, but on the way home we let Sam watch her Barbie video.  For the first time, she watched an entire movie.  For 83 minutes, she was captivated.  For some reason, this made me proud. (By the way, I really like this movie, Barbie as Rapunzel, and I've heard that the whole Barbie series is quite good.  The music is nice, the story is charming, and there is not a lot of fast scene-switching.  Sam seems to understand the basic plot and talks about it afterwards.  We'll definitely be buying more from this series.)

At the campground, we stayed in a little "cabin" which I think was half of a trailer home.  It was clean and cozy, with a bathroom and kitchen.  We brought our dog along on the trip but they didn't allow pets in the cabins, so he stayed in my parents' RV with them.  I guess the enormous bugs that could not be kept out of the cabin didn't count as pets, though.  Holy cow, the bugs!  The bad part was the mosquitoes all day long, not just at dusk.  The good part was the dragonflies and butterflies that were hovering about at all times.  Quite pretty!

We were able to spend a lot of good time with my parents, also known as Grandee and Grando.  Grandee cooked a lot of good food, and, of course, brownies.  We had a campfire the first night, which is always my favorite part of camping.

The campground had a little lake with a fountain in the middle and we rented a paddleboat and took Sam out on it.  She seems to like boating, and I'm determined to get her out on the water at every opportunity to keep that interest alive.  I love boats.

The lake was stocked with fish and Sam got to seem them jumping out of the water.  That was a first.  She also saw a little girl, no more than 9 years old, catch a fish.  We saw the whole thing: she cast the line, the thingy bobbed, the girl pulled on the rod and then reeled it in.  Her older brother took the fish off the hook and put it in a bucket of water, where we watched the fish swim and jump angrily around in circles before settling in to his fate.

On the Fourth, we went to a little town called Elizabeth City to watch the fireworks.  There was a good military band playing, and a moon bounce to pass the time until it got dark.  We also saw a woman holding (wearing?) a python, and Sam got to touch it.  It's not the first time she's touched a snake, but again, we try to take every opportunity for Sam to have these interesting experiences. 

Since Sam has recently decided that she is afraid of thunder, I knew the fireworks might be a problem, but I didn't think about it much.  We just kept a semi-casual, semi-excited attitude.  She was sitting on my lap as we waited for the show to start.  When she saw the first explosion, I felt her sit up straight with interest, but when she heard that first explosion a moment later, she cowered into my shoulder.  The rest of the show was the ultimate in what Adam and I call, "scared-curious."  We actually invented that term for our cat, who seems to be in a permanent state of ambivalence, but it is certainly applicable to many things with Samantha as well.  She was fascinated and scared at the same time.  She alternated between being transfixed and saying, GO HOME NOW. NO FIREWORKS. SHOOK. [Scared.]  She was never scared enough for us to pack up and call it quits, and I think that she enjoyed it overall.  I was proud of her.  It was quite a nice fireworks show too.  We all enjoyed it.

We had planned to hit the beach at Outer Banks the next day, but we slept in late and it looked like rain, so we just went to another local town for a picnic at a park instead.  The park had a playground, so Sam was happy.

On the way home, we stopped for dinner at The Smokey Pig restaurant in Ashland, Virginia.  It's just one of those hokey places with a silly name that you see everywhere on the side of the road, and the food was sub-par.  But it was a highlight of the trip because the whole place was filled with pigs - pictures of pigs, statues of pigs, stuffed pigs, carved wooden pigs, even a poster of Pigs in Space.  Sam loved it enough that we grabbed a to-go menu for the Adventure Box.

As you can tell, most of my thoughts about this trip revolve around Samantha.  That's fine with me.  Watching her experience new things and places is one of the great joys of parenting.  Still, I'm really looking forward to our next trip, which will include a Samantha-free weekend for Adam and me.  Now that will be a first for the adults in the family!