The things we do for our children

I slipped a 14-year-old CD into the disk drive (is that what they’re still called?) in the car. The CD was homemade by five gals who once belonged to a groovy chick group called the SixPack. My sister Liz was one of the Six. When she turned 21, her sisterhood presented her with a CD called “Liz’s Last Night Out”.  I don’t understand why they called it that because she had just turned 21 and isn’t that really supposed to be one’s First Night Out?

Among the several groovy tunes one immediately caught my boys’ attention.

Ice Ice Baby

by Vanilla Ice

I know you remember it.

So picture this. We’re blasting Ice Ice Baby because the boys are loving it, literally bouncing in their seats, and we roll up in our hybrid car into the enormous parking lot at Costco.

I glance over at my husband is who is cringing openly and smiling broadly. He tolerates a bit of children’s music, and he deeply appreciates quality music of many genres… jazz, blues, bluegrass, industrial, classical. I lean over to whisper:

Think back to when you met me. Did you ever in a million years dream that one day we’d be rolling up into Costco (a huge warehouse store that he also hates) with two kids in a Prius rocking out to Vanilla Ice?

Maybe you had to be there, but it was really really funny at the time.

He shook his head. The things we do for our children – indeed.

Were it not for the fact that I opted to sit by him in a lecture on Dominican food, everything may have turned out so differently.

Next weekend we’re going camping in a remote part of Oregon. Our music will include the soft breeze shuffling through the trees and a coyote crying in the woods. Birdsong will be our alarm clock.  I hope we meet a gentle deer foraging for food as the sun slips beneath the horizon. I hope my kids will sleep for twelve hours, tucked into bright orange sleeping bags, each wearing a headlamp. By day’s end, we will be marshmallow sticky with windtossed hair and suncolored cheeks.

I expect the experience to be far superior than a morning spent pushing a gigantic cart at Costco.

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Sarita - Sunshine and Salad

Hey, why not visit my blog! Just a little about me, I’m a 30-something aspiring writer and fulltime public health manager, mother of two young boys, and wife to my loving husband, whom I met as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic. Raised in northern Virginia, I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for the past six years and cherish my life outside the busy Washington DC Beltway! While not attempting to co-run the household, juggle kids + dog + fulltime job, I run, swim, and practice yoga. And of course, I write. I currently have two projects underway: 1) a nonfiction book proposal based on endurance sport and psychological transformation and 2) a memoir based on a profound and powerful experience that I continue to receive, welcome, resist, and accept in varying degrees. Personally, one of my greatest dreams is to achieve uninterrupted deep sleep and wake well rested, but in the meantime, I am truly enjoying the journey.

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