Meaningful Glances

At the corner of Breaker and Minnehaha, Brigetta put voice to the prevailing sentiment in our van: "Why do we always have to leave on the nicest day?" I harrumphed in commiseration as we turned south on to Highway 101 today, bound for home via Tillamook and it's famous cheese factory. Barely a cloud could be seen for all the blue sky and sunshine. I peered out the passenger side window for those few miles to Tillamook, taking in the bay vista - it's gentle undulations sparkling under the noonday sun and glinting off the occasional hull of a passing boat. With the temperature pushing 60 degrees and the wind uncharacteristically mellow, forget Spring - it felt like a Summer day compared to what we're used to in mid-February.

On about a day's notice, we left town in twilight this past Tuesday evening after I'd completed a scheduled test for the Census Bureau application process (temporary address-canvasing jobs this Spring). We prefer to make longer road trips in daylight, but the tradeoff of being able to spend two whole days at our favorite beach house was well worth it. Even though Brigetta did the driving on the way there, my lower back was screaming at me after taking a wrong step in the dark on Monday night and foolishly spending about 20 minutes hunched over our car on Tuesday morning to change an air filter. Since I had recovered from some sort of upper back strain a couple of months or so ago, I still had plenty of these little yellow unpronounceable pills lying around - muscle relaxers. There's a good reason that I had a lot of them on hand: I hated using them. They work, but Peter, Paul, and Mary do they pack a knockout punch! I've slept for 12 hours (twelve!) without so much as stirring after taking one of these before. I was willing to do it again, though, if it meant I could function for our little vacation. I don't really remember what time I went to bed that first night, but it was some time around 11pm. Brigetta coaxed me awake some time between 9 and 10am on Wednesday. And I was still tired for most of the day. Good news is, the pain had fallen to a manageable level and I was able to get out on the beach with my girls and throw a terrifically slimy and sandy tennis ball around for Scout.

I decided to forego the hibernation pill our second night, so I was feeling just about normal on Thursday morning. We decided to make the drive out to Cape Meares on the far side of Tillamook Bay and spend some time "hiking." The trail - paved - is all of 1/5th of a mile from the parking lot to the lighthouse that used to stand sentinel for ships passing by this picturesque but somewhat severe section of the Oregon coastline. We've been out here several times, so it was quite the surprise to step out of the car and NOT be immediately blasted by the wind. It was almost completely calm for our entire visit and the sea far below echoed that calmness with only the most gentle swells visible outside of the breakers and turbulent foam that surround several rock formations. We took our time, stopping at each little viewpoint along the cliff side, me channeling my inner Papa Russy and going nature photo crazy, and Brigetta helping Evelyn see over the fences to the various wonders below. Only one or two other couples seem to have been lucky enough to share the extraordinary calm and beauty of that place with us for that afternoon. We departed after making the not-quite-half-mile loop and made our way back up to Rockaway for lunch and a nap at Breaker Bungalow, followed by an early evening trip to the beach for all our favorite activities: running, chasing, collecting treasures, building sand castles, destroying sand castles, and so on. Then, after sharing the evening meal together and getting Evelyn to bed, Brigetta and I planted our exhausted backsides in comfy chairs and read for a bit before the muted roar of the surf drew me to move in to the bedroom and just listen. It's never taken me long to fall asleep when that most soothing of sounds is within earshot. I wrote a poem about it once that now hangs in my dad's office - a memory of falling asleep in the canopied bed of my Grandpa's truck during a summer camp out at Wi-ne-ma camp. No alarm clock or other device with so-called "nature sounds" has ever gotten it quite right. Nothing else can mimic the roar or the occasional clap of liquid thunder when a particularly large breaker crests higher than the others. Up close it's powerful, even intimidating, but just a few steps away it becomes calming and peaceful. Other than the company I bring with me, it's what I love best about the visiting the coast, and it's also hijacking this blog entry, so let me catch you up on the rest of our trip...

Lest we wonder where our little Evelyn learned how to be manipulative, we need look no farther than our deliberation on how to break the news to her that we were going home today. In nothing less than a militarily precise strategic decision, we started telling her while there were still fun things to do. Before we made our last visit to the beach, for one, AND - the euphemious ace up our collective sleeve - before going to the Tillamook Cheese Factory for lunch and - leave nothing to chance - an ice cream cone! Success! Nary a tear was shed as we cleaned up after ourselves and left Breaker Bungalow to it's next guests and hit the road. Evelyn managed to smite a few more strangers on the way - line workers on the factory floor this time - with a simple wave and smile. A few other patrons couldn't help but take notice, either, as she set about consuming her promised ice cream cone with, as Dr. Seuss was fond of writing, "great vim and great vigor." Also a great mess. But we had fun, without a doubt. From what we hear, it may be our last opportunity for quite some time to visit Breaker Bungalow, so we'll treasure the times we had and look forward to some other future adventure.

You should know that, as I type this first sentence, it's 1:00 pm. I finished my breakfast not long ago, and I only woke up as early as I did because a friend called during their lunch break. Let me explain.

Some of you might also read my wife's blog, and if you have seen her entry from last night, you will know that I dismantled Evelyn's crib yesterday. Correction: I finished dismantling Evelyn's crib yesterday. She started it the night before by snapping one of the metal brackets that holds the base to the frame as she tried to jump her way to sleep yet again. When Brigetta got home from work last night, I had the time to look a little closer at the damage and decide that it wasn't worth fixing. We already had the spin in place - Evelyn got to go to the park while daddy tried to fix her bed, but she knew that if he couldn't, he would make it in to a "big girl bed." Translation: I took apart the crib and put her mattress on the floor. I did everything I could to make it a cozy spot - that includes, in case you were worried, vacuuming thoroughly - and she was thrilled when she came home to see her "new" bed surrounded by some of her favorite stuffed animals with Granny's quilt and her puppy pillow on top. Come bed time, as Brigetta wrote in her blog, she ran right to her bed to crawl in and here's where the adventure begins. At about half past eight, after we'd sung our good night song and said a prayer, Evelyn broke from tradition (and why not, given her recent proclivity to break things?) and asked if Daddy would help her go to sleep. If you've kept up on how sleep works around here, you'd immediately grasp the significance here. If you haven't kept up, I'll spell it out: she NEVER asks this if she knows Brigetta is around, let alone in the same room. So, in almost stunned disbelief, Brigetta gave Evelyn a kiss and said good night, and Evelyn settled in to asking me "what animals do." We chatted briefly about the different things that animals do - whether or not little girls and boys do these things, too, etc. - until I mentioned, quite deliberately, that animals go to sleep. To my surprise, she actually stopped talking about it right away and was mostly quiet the rest of the way.

I should have known it was too good to be true.

TWO HOURS later, after attempting (unsuccessfully) to leave several times, mostly after I was sure she was asleep, she finally settled in to a regular snore. I was caught a little off-guard by the clinginess that preceded it, though. I told myself (still am telling myself, really) that it was a different bed at a different level, there was no sense of being enclosed, and so on - but she blame near panicked every time she thought I was leaving. So I stayed. And stayed, and stayed, and stayed. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I got in a 20-minute power nap - you now, one of those short, refreshing naps that leave you ready to go for the rest of the day? Yeah, one of those, only with no rest-of-the-day left. Don't get me wrong - I was happy (and a little flattered, sure) to be asked to stay with her while she went to sleep, but it was simultaneously and incredibly frustrating to lay awake for the better part of two hours while she tossed, turned, and made sure my face was still right next to her bed. So at a little past 10:30pm, I marshalled all of my stealth skills and left her room as quietly as possible, fearful that any misstep would cause another panic.

Now I'm a night-owl as it is, but with the extra two hours of laying around and a power nap under my belt, I really didn't have a chance of getting to sleep. I chatted and watched TV with Brigetta for a little bit before she ran off to bed and then I was left to my own devices. Nothing too out of the ordinary about that - I'm up later than she is most nights, either reading, watching TV, or playing games online with a few fellow night-owl friends. The latter is what I did last night, meeting up with 4 or 5 friends to run around a virtual WWII, shoot guns, and throw grenades. Ya know - guy stuff. Until 3 in the morning! That's late, even for me...and I still wasn't tired! I had to draw the line somewhere, though, so I bowed out of the carnage and made myself go crawl in to bed. Not five minutes after doing that, the following phrase - again a first-ever - came floating over from the monitor in Evelyn's room: "I want my daddy." Somewhere between "You've got to be kidding me," and "Well, I'm already awake," I found myself padding over to her room, sweatshirt in hand, to curl up next to my little girl and feel her little hand reach out to make sure it was my face there before thinking "This isn't so bad," and immediately falling asleep.

I remember having to move her back on to her bed once after she'd managed to get her head on to the middle of my pillow, and then Brigetta was gently shaking me awake at 7:30-ish (?), at which point I stumbled back to my own bed, bouncing off door jams along the way, to slumber for a few hours more. So when the call from a friend came at ten minutes to noon, I snapped awake with that "I'm late for work" surge of adrenaline, which isn't entirely inappropriate since this is my day to get the bulk of my work from home done. And here I am blogging about it instead of doing it...

It was a story worth telling, though (I think), but not one I'm terrifically eager to repeat. I'll tell you how the "big girl bed" experiment continues when there's more to tell.