Riley and Avery

The annual picture of all the cousins outside the Kite Loft in Ocean City!

Miss Riley, attitude and all!

Seaweed! The new fashion accessory!


My favorite picture of Riley at the beach this year.

Sooooo happy to be at the beach!

Daddy and Riley stargazing at night on the beach.

Little Miss Blue Eyes.

Yes, Avery was TERRIFIED of the water! To be fair, she did try to run from a wave and landed on her face in the sand and water. After that, she would not trust anyone near the water, and screamed and ran towards the hotel if she was put down anywhere sandy. Ugh.

I know it's been forever since I blogged. Just got out of habit (although it's debatable whether I was ever IN the habit).

We are home. Obviously. Four days of driving and we're home. Oklahoma was nasty, so was the Texas panhandle. Utter desolation. Especially Texas. Nothing anywhere but rusted out abandoned warehouses and farms. New Mexico wasn't all that different, landscape-wise, but showed signs of life. Driving through to Roswell at night, there would be a dim house light in the distance, and a school bus-stop sign. The hotel we stayed in in Roswell was N-A-S-T-Y. Well before even starting on our trip home, I decided that little to no personal belongings would be allowed in any hotel room, especially after Riley's nasty rash caused by, most likely, bedbug bites from a hotel we stayed in on our way out to Maryland. Sure didn't want to bring those nasty suckers home. Well, this hotel in Roswell was beyond disgusting. Had it not been 10pm, be would have searched elsewhere. After getting in, Rudi ran out to grab some eats for himself and the kids and while they ate, I decided to shower the road grime off of me (it had already been 3 days on the road by then) and I went out to the car to get a change of clothes. Roaches were EVERYWHERE! Pardon my middle-class upbringing white self, but I had only seen roaches in the zoo before (kid you not!). I ran inside and told Rudi to hurry up and finish eating because every scrap of food was going to be thrown in the outside trashcan. I didn't want anything to attract those little buggers into our room. There were some holes in the room covered with duct tape, and smaller holes that the owners didn't think worth the duct tape to cover. Trash under the beds that wasn't ours. Oh my goodness, so nasty! And I think that Motel 6 or Super 8 are luxury, so you know this place was a dump!

So, Roswell itself. Interesting town. In the middle of nowhere, literally. Government conspiracy or not, I think it is just as likely that Roswell is conspiring to keep itself relevant and in existence. Without the supposed aliens, Roswell as a town would have been pretty much dead decades ago. Really, nothing to offer, and in the middle of nowhere.

Speaking of Riley's rash, here are the pictures again because it's morbidly disgusting!:

Seriously, that's not even as bad as it got. Not at all. The area around each scab oozed and created more scabs. Nice. That doctor at the urgent care clinic was a wack-a-doo. Totally wrong. Didn't give any opinion as to what it was, other than to say that it looked like shingles (looks NOTHING like shingles if you search Google images) and told us not to go to the beach at all, and if we had to (duh) to get a water tight seal and not get it wet. Didn't sound right to me, so I took her to James' and William's ped, Dr. Ambush, who said he thought it was impetigo (and it matches the description perfectly!) and that we should, by all means, let her swim in the ocean and the pool as often as possible, saying it would do a world of good. So we did. Homegirl was in the ocean twice a day and in the pool at least once a day. It began clearing up after her first swim in the ocean. Literally.

I know that perhaps I'm being too hard on the urgent care doc. But after Avery's "unexplained" rash on her face in her first year that oozed and bled, after multiple courses of antibiotics, constant refusals to consider allergies as a source of the rash, run around after run around, only to find that she was allergic to dairy, eggs, and peanuts (I had to refer my self, for heaven's sake!) I have had it up to HERE with "unexplained" or poo-pooed rashes. Grrrr...It's an admittedly sensitive area for me.

So, yesterday I go out to run some errands. I needed to go to Joanns for fabric to make Riley a first-day-of-school dress (being naively optimistic that I'll have it done by then) and needed to go to Old Navy because they had jeans for $10 and Riley has, as far as I can tell, ONE pair of pants for the fall. Old Navy's jeans were a bust. They just weren't shaped for little girls. You can't really take jeans that fit a 12 year old and shrink them for a 5 yo and think the proportions will be the same. Totally unrealistic jeans. Very narrow in the hips and thighs, too low of a rise, and the flare jeans were ridiculous. Ugh. And she's too big for the 5T in the toddler girls section.

Anyway, while I was in Old Navy a really LOUD storm rolls in. You know, the warehouse roof on that place really amplified the sound. I wandered around Old Navy longer than I would had it not been pouring buckets. I did get two long sleeve shirts 2/$10 and two pairs of yoga pants 2/$10, that will hopfully fit. So I leave the store, and there is marble-sized hail all over the place! I mean, like piled on the sidewalks and on my car. I left my cell phone at home, but Rudi had tried to call me and make sure that I wasn't actually driving during the storm. He was worried that the huge hail would break my already-cracked windshield if I were actually driving.

So, I get home and the girls are all excited about the hail (and it rained a ton too). I look at my garden and it is totally DESTROYED! The garden box was FILLED with hail balls. Then I notice that Riley's Leapster was outside too. It was sitting on a plastic, slightly concave table, in a puddle of water. I won't lie. I freaked. I yelled. I was mad. We just got that thing right before going to MD and it was not cheap. I tell Riley over and over again that she is not to bring things outside, particularly the Leapster. I took the batteries out and dried them. I unscrewed the body of the Leapster, separating the two parts, towel dried is as much as was safe, and left it to air dry. I don't want to jinx it, but the darn thing appears to be WORKING! I will not lie, that thing was sitting in a PUDDLE of water! Wow.

Okay, I'm done for now! Perhaps I'll think of something else later...