Gravity

One of the first things we do when we get to the beach, after we've set up camp, is dig a big old hole. On this day we first dug a trench, and I worked on the hole (and the fortish wall in front of it) while Kiernan played with his dinosaurs in the trench. This big old hole usually takes a couple hours to dig, but this work is not constant. This work is constantly interrupted by trips to the ocean to fill buckets with water for Kiernan's trench experiments. He loves to set up his dinosaurs in the trench and then pour a bucketful of water at the mouth of the trench and see how the dinosaurs react. So I spend a lot of time walking to and fro from the ocean with buckets, all the while thinking of ways to work "carrying water for the Kiernan Administration" into a blog post.

There, I just did it. Phew.

I used to pretend that digging this big hole and making a fort and building sand castles was all for Kiernan and was a chore for me. I suppose I'm done with that pretense now. It turns out I just like playing in the sand. In particular, digging a big hole in the sand. Kiernan likes this too, to be sure, but I'm done pretending it's solely for him. I'll be honest. I dig this big hole because it's fun and somehow primal and having a son gives me an excuse to do this without looking like too much of a crazy person. There's something cool about rooting about in the sand. I'd love to dig a whole network of tunnels down there.

Please, let's not page Dr. Freud at this point.

At any rate, it turns out these big holes I dig for myself Kiernan and me to play in are not just interesting to us. It turns out these holes are kid magnets. In particular, boy magnets.

Now I've covered this before. In our first trip to the beach our hole was overrun by a bunch of kids. This happened again on our next trip, but I never got around to posting about that. Which is a shame, because it elicited some great quotes about kindergarten and Oprah. I promise to try to get around to that.

What usually happens is that I'm in the hole scooping out sand. I can barely be seen by people down the beach from me. Invariably some kid catches a glimpse of the hole and decides to investigate. He approaches with his little brother(s). They all say, "Cool!" Then they ask, "Can we jump in?" This is not so much a question as a mission statement. I look around hoping to see parents, grandparents, guardians, officers of the court...anybody. No adult manifests. The kids jump in.

At this point I leave the hole--I can't really be mucking about in this deep hole in the sand with children I don't know when their parents aren't around--and go to sit on the blanket and Kiernan sets about the work of making new friends.

This is a bittersweet moment. I lose the lovely labor of making my weird sand hole. But then again I gain a few moments of quiet reflection. Of peace. I can sit while Kiernan plays with other kids. And for a brief moment I see the value of having more than one kid. For a time I'm not required to be "on" for Kiernan. He is engaged with other kids. I'm basically unnecessary.

Yeah, the kids engage with me. For some reason kids do this. Just as they feel comfortable pouncing on the cool hole/fort I've constructed in the sand they somehow naturally feel comfortable conversing with me and generally disregarding my personal space. Most of the time this is fine. Sometimes it is weird. In the case of the second trip to the beach, which I promise to elaborate on, it serves to help me understand my friends who do not want kids and do not care to be around them. I wonder where their parents are and why they are suddenly my responsibility and why it's okay that they are suddenly dismantling this very cool hole I've dug in the sand.


No matter, it's only sand. And in today's case it's all good because Kiernan has again found some friends. Three brothers. Justin is the oldest (pictured, with stick), and he is fascinated by the hole but also fairly respectful. He bothers to ask me my name and Kiernan's name. He then proceeds to carve our names in the sand of our fort walls. I can tell he's a nice kid. The middle brother, Ryan (pictured, digging), is too. At one point he realizes they have all destroyed the fort and he says to me, "You did a lot of work. We're ruining it." I wave him off. It's only sand.

The littlest brother (pictured, blonde) is nice too. His birthday is exactly a month past Kiernan's. He is a big kid, much taller than Kiernan, but not quite as articulate. He is easily the most destructive of the lot, but then he is four and his name is Trevor. Trevor is one of those names. It's a harbinger name, like Cody or Dakota or Cooper. When you meet one of those kids, you know you're in for trouble. That's just the way it is.

Trevor isn't a bad kid, he's just a destructo kid. His brothers keep him in check for a bit but then they run off to do their thing and Trevor starts destroying the fort. He's not my kid so I'm not going to stop him. Eventually his mother shows up and says, weakly, "Trevor, don't mess that up. Don't mess up other people's stuff." But she says this half-heartedly, as if she's just entering it into the record. Again, it's just sand so who cares?


Finally Justin and Ryan run off and Kiernan and Trevor get down to serious playing. They take off down the beach and play in the surf. I've been trying to get Kiernan to play in the water all day and he has refused. But these boys jump in and he's all for it. He rolls around in the water with Trevor. They find a huge rock and decide to work together to bring it back to our base camp. This takes a good twenty minutes, but they persevere. It's really pretty neat watching them do this. Two mini Sisyphuses working so hard, not asking for help.

When Kiernan and Trevor arrive at the wrecked hole/fort with their rock, they play there for a bit. I say a word or two about Kiernan's dinosaurs.

Trevor says, "Your dad sounds like Elvis."

Wait. What?

Kiernan says, "Who's Elvis?"

Without hesitation Trevor replies, "He's the famouser dancer in the world."

"Dancer?" I say, before I can stop myself.

"Singer," Trevor corrects himself. "He's the famouser singer in the world."

Folks, I've heard a lot of things about myself. That I used to look like Lou Diamond Philips. That I should record audio books. That I sound like Elvis, the famouser singer/dancer in the world? That's a first.

Eventually Trevor and his family have to leave. We walk Justin's boogie board down to where the family has their blanket, over near the rocks, and Kiernan says goodbye. This goodbye is far easier than the first goodbye of the season, when he moped all the way home. This time he just says "Bye!" and heads off with me, content in the time he's had to play.

The big old hole in the sand is mostly filled in, thanks to the ministrations of Trevor, so I don't have to do anything. We pack up and head back home. This is probably the last day of our beach season. We'll see. If it was, it was a good one.

When September Ends

That's the first picture I took of our trip to the beach on Monday, when Kiernan's school was closed for Yom Kippur and Wendy was on a work trip to Texas. We got to the sand, spread out the blanket, slathered on the sunblock, and Kiernan got down to business burying his dinosaurs in the sand.

Velociraptor says "Hi".


I don't speak Dino, so I can't be certain, but I believe I can interpret Saltosaurus' expression below as, "Oh the humanity."


We pretty much had the beach to ourselves.


A beautiful, moderate day, so welcome after all the oppressive heat of the Valley these last weeks. It was even a little overcast, which was a nice change. There were some surfers down at the surfer area, all sitting on their boards, bobbing up and down in the water. And a couple of guys stacking rocks down in the rocky section of the beach. Seriously. A long stretch of this beach is all rock, and these two dudes were stacking the rocks and balancing them and making cairns out of them. I wish I'd taken a picture of that, but I was in pack-animal mode when I saw them so I really couldn't. Here's a picture that shows some of the rocky area:


Those dots in the water over Kiernan's shoulder are the aforementioned surfers. The building there in the distance is the restroom/shower/lifeguard station. The parking lot is directly behind that, up an embankment. We walk down the beach past the rocky area and stake out an area with plenty of sand. We will bury dinosaurs with this sand. We will dig a trench and position the dinosaurs in the trench and then pour buckets of water down the trench to see how the dinosaurs get "slooshed" downstream. We will dig an enormous hole and jump into and out of it (more on the hole in a bit).

We will also constantly chase away seagulls. Because we have a history with them. One almost absconded with one of his toys last year. This was a fairly traumatic moment, but don't worry. It has made us stronger.


Here we see Kiernan about to go after a seagull he believes is getting a little too close to his dinosaurs. To me he kind of looks like a raptor as he makes his approach.


Here he confronts the seagull head on. What you can't hear, since this picture oddly has no audio, is the impressive Microraptor call Kiernan gives as he does this. It's really something. Next time you see him, ask him to do that for you. Make sure you're in a quiet restaurant and/or have a headache when you do this.

Next...The Black Hole.

Sand Before Time: Part II

After the bee we spent more time goofing around in the sand. One of Kiernan's favorite things to do at the beach is to play "the restaurant game". It's a weird little game we came up with last year. He recalled it from last year and requested it this year when we came to the beach again. It's a pretty dopey game, but he loves it. Basically the game involves digging a deep hole. I am in the hole, continuing to dig it out. He approaches the hole, clearly intending to jump into the hole on top of me.

I protest, putting on my best maitre'd voice. "I'm sorry sir. Do you have a reservation?"

He pounces on me. I determine he did not, indeed, have a reservation, and I demand he leave. He laughs at me and I throw him out of the hole, bellowing, "Get out! And stay out!"

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

A couple of things.

1. How exactly this game came about I cannot tell you.
2. Kiernan wants to play it constantly once the hole is dug.
3. If I don't throw him out of the hole, he demands I throw him out of the hole. He finds this hilarious.
4. Last year this was easier.

After the bee sting we played this for awhile longer until I found a rock buried at the bottom of the hole. We excavated it, and this shifted Kiernan's focus. At last! Suddenly he wanted to dig rocks.

We did this for awhile, and it was pretty cool. The above pictures are him tunneling for more rocks.

After we dug out about a dozen large rocks I was pretty much ready to hit the road. We'd been at the beach for about five hours by this time, and I figured it was time to go. It was at this point that Kiernan decided to make some new friends.

Let me just say that I am very proud of how my son makes friends. He is much better than I am socially. I just don't always appreciate his timing.

Next to us on the beach was a family with four kids. These kids had shown a great deal of interest in our super cool deep hole, and Kiernan invited them over to play in it. They had tried to dig their own hole, but they clearly found it inferior for as soon as Kiernan invited them over they began jumping in our hole with abandon. Much to their parents' chagrin.

They all spent some time pouncing into our hole in the sand--I relocated myself to our blanket for my first real break of the day. At one point the oldest, a boy named Aidan, asked if Kiernan and I would help them make their hole as deep as ours. I demurred, figuring if their dad wasn't going to help them out (he was mainly interested in surfing), I wasn't going to show him up. Kiernan--once again besting me socially--grabbed our shovels and ran over to join them at their hole.

What followed was about an hour more of play, and he was in heaven. They dug the hole for awhile and then they all headed down to the surf to play run-away-from-the-waves-and-shriek. All day I'd been trying to get Kiernan interested in the water to no avail. But one six-year-old boy suggests the same thing and he does not hesitate for a moment.

Beautiful.

They all played in the water until the adults had had enough. We all packed up and headed back to our cars.

On the way home, driving through Topanga Canyon, Kiernan was uncharacteristically silent. As we got close to home, he revealed why. Aidan.

This has happened quite a bit lately. Kiernan will meet a kid. Immediately bond with him. Then, as they have to part ways, say because they have met in an airport and are taking different flights, he will just break down because this kid also loves dinosaurs and he will never meet another kid like this in his life.

By the time we got home Kiernan was flat out sobbing. "Aidan! Aidan!" It was amazing. An ending worthy of Shakespeare. Or, at least Rocky.

The Bee's Knee

We were digging a trench in front of the volcano when it happened. The waves had been getting progressively closer to our play area, and while the hole we were working on had a pretty good wall in front of it, aside from a skimpy little moat the volcano was vulnerable. Kiernan wanted to help with the trench digging, so we were working on that together.

Suddenly Kiernan said, "Ouch!" He lifted up his knee, surprised. We both saw it at the same time. A little bee in the impression his knee had left.

"What was that?" Kiernan said, though I'm sure he knew.

"A bee, buddy. You just got your first bee sting," I replied, forcing a calm onto my voice that I did not feel. This calm didn't immediately pan out as Kiernan began crying in a high-pitched panicked cry.

I kept my calm as best I could, moving him to the blanket so that I could examine his knee. Wendy has spoken of being pretty severely allergic to bee stings for as long as I've known her, so this came to mind immediately. But what also came to mind was the time she stepped on a bee when she was pregnant.

Nothing happened, remember? I told myself, silently. Her foot got a little swollen and that's all. Calm down.

I wiped away the sand and tried to determine if the stinger was still there. Couldn't find it. Kiernan was still howling, but I could feel him calming down. "It hurts! It hurts!"

"Let's put some ice on it," I said, reaching into the cooler. "What do you think?"

"Yes." Calmer.

First I pulled out the blue ice pack thingy and put that on his knee. All that did was stain a bit of his knee blue, because the thing had a hole in it. I ditched it in favor of an actual ice cube which I wrapped in a paper towel. I rubbed that on his knee for a bit, then we looked at the sting site again. Just a little swollen. Like a mosquito bite.

A few more tears. Just a few. A few more minutes of ice. Laughter. Then it was back into the hole. The picture at the top of this post was taken probably five minutes after the incident.

Later he would proudly tell his mother about the whole thing on the phone.

For my part I took a bit longer to relax inside. I asked him a few times how he felt, how his knee felt and how his throat felt. Why? I don't know. I guess I had some idea that this question would help me determine if we were headed for anaphylactic shock or something. What I would have done if this turned out to be the case, I have no idea.

The thought that did hit me, when I felt most tense, was how utterly unhelpful that bromide about more people dying from bee stings than from shark attacks is. It seems I've read that a lot lately, as Kiernan has also been interested in sharks and just about every book about sharks mentions it. It came to me then that this should hardly be a comforting thought, even, ironically enough, fifteen feet from the Pacific Ocean.

In the end we had to worry about neither sharks nor bees. I do wonder, however, whether this will prove to make Kiernan less bee-phobic, or more.

I suppose we shall see.

Sand Before Time

Kiernan and I spent Sunday together at the beach, finding a way to get our minds off of the fact that Wendy was flying to Baltimore for work for a couple of days. There's probably a couple of pictures better than this one for starting off a post about the beach, but I just love the look on the face of that seagull behind Kiernan.

That bird reminds me of a bird from a trip we took to the beach last year. I can't find the post or I'd link to it, but the seagull during that visit grabbed Kiernan's fish toy and tried to fly away with it. Kiernan screamed and I chased the seagull until the bird dropped the toy.

During this trip we were keenly aware of the ever-present birds because Kiernan's precious dinosaurs were along for the trip. There was no way we were going to let one of those nutty birds abscond with one of the dinosaurs. No way.

If you look carefully at these pictures you will see a couple of things. You'll see the dinosaurs, of course. And you'll see Kiernan standing in a big hole.

This is the first time we have taken the dinosaurs to the beach. Basically that's because this is the first opportunity. Kiernan is crazy about dinosaurs right now. Crazy about them. And he has a ton of them. So, naturally, he wanted to bring them to the beach. I told him to choose which dinos came with us carefully. None with moving parts and certainly none with batteries should come along. He chose wisely, selecting a modest group of fifteen for the trip.

As for the big hole, well that has become a staple of our trips to the beach. Last year I would start to build a castle and then dig a hole. Kiernan would destroy the castle and jump in the hole. This year I made a volcano the dinosaurs could climb and then dug the hole. Kiernan did not destroy the volcano. Progress. Maturity.

The hole, as usual, attracted plenty of attention from other beach goers. The dinosaurs did too. Especially from two groups. Toddler boys and fathers. The toddler boys would slow down as they walked by the scene of the dinosaurs on the sand volcano. Their jaws would drop. Kiernan would ask, "Why is he looking at my dinosaurs?" The dads would just smile. One of them said, "Wow. What a cool prehistoric scene!"

I took plenty of pictures of the dinos. Here's my favorite. Dilophosaurus on the volcano.


Shortly after I took this picture we experienced a first. A little scary, but we weathered it. What was it? Kiernan's first bee sting.


I'll talk about that more in the second part of this post.

Walking Distance

At the beginning of April we took a little family vacation. This picture is from the San Clemente portion of our trip, which was the second part of the vacation. The first part took place over a weekend in San Diego, where Wendy was slated to give a presentation to a conference. After all, it wouldn't be a vacation unless you had some work to do on the trip.

San Diego was good. We got to visit Seaworld, thanks to my dad and stepmom and brother, and did a little touring of the city. I'll post some pictures from that part of the trip as well, and talk about it more then.

I just wanted to get off the schneid and start posting again. So I decided to go with this picture of Kiernan on the beach in front of the San Clemente pier.

San Clemente is this great little seaside town just south of Los Angeles. Wendy and I stayed there a few years ago; ever since we have both dreamed of going back. A friend back then suggested a hotel/resort that was right down near the beach and we had a great time. I held onto the brochure from the place--because I save everything--and dug it out for this trip. I'm so glad I did. The place we stayed, The Sea Horse Resort, was great for us. It was not the most fancy place in the world, which is to say the amenities were few. But when you're staying across the street from the ocean, with a view of the pier, and can open the sliding glass door and hear the waves crashing all night long, who needs amenities?

We had a great time down in San Clemente doing what I like to do best on vacations: nothing. We got there and Kiernan and I almost immediately went across the street to play on the beach. There was a crepe place just a few steps down the sidewalk from where we were staying. We ate breakfast there all three mornings we were in San Clemente, both because Wendy is nuts about crepes and because the coffee at the place was excellent. I've never really understood the whole crepe thing, though Wendy makes a mean crepe. To me it's like eating whatever you're eating on a thing that would like to be a tortilla but hasn't quite made it and instead tastes like soggy, slightly eggy, paper. But the crepes at this place were good, and the coffee kept me coming back. And one morning there I had some of the best brie I've ever had in my life.

Plus it was within walking distance of our hotel and the beach. That's hard to beat.

All in all the dining was pretty good in San Clemente due in no small part to the fact that we walked to almost every meal. There was a fish restaurant across the street at the pier. We had appetizers there the first night (a great cajun ahi tuna for me) and a great dinner the last night (a fantastic wild striped sea bass for me). The only dinner that disappointed was at a Swiss/German place called The Swiss Chalet. I had remembered eating there during our previous visit, years ago, and thought it might be a nice place to try again. The food was actually pretty good, but it took forever to get to us. Seriously, the salads did not go down until forty-five minutes after we ordered them, and we didn't order appetizers. There was a time when I would have considered this type of wait a "leisurely meal"...that was the time before I had a two-year 0ld. Considering how long it took, Kiernan was remarkably well-behaved though. He also helped us make friends with the people sitting near us, most notably the table of four great-grandmothers. One of them was a neighbor of the chef/owner of the restaurant who was put off by the wait for food as well. So it wasn't just us. She told us the place hadn't been the same since the wife stopped working there, and that sounded just ominous enough that I didn't ask her to elaborate.

Good food though. Not that German food is that hard to do. That's the only thing that puts me off about going to a German place. Most of the stuff is so easy I can do it myself at home, and when I go out I want to get stuff I don't necessarily know how to do myself. Many German restaurants in America are full of simple things, like sausages and pork chops and little else. Maybe the odd rolled meat dish. A couple of schnitzels. The menus are often exceedingly short. I did like the food in Germany when we went a couple years ago, but I was crazy for the food of Switzerland, mainly because in my memory we had cheese fondue at every meal (which is probably why I came back to the states weighing about fifteen pounds more than I did when we left). This place in San Clemente had cheese fondue, but you could only have it if two people were ordering it, and Wendy doesn't eat cheese.

Why Swiss places cannot figure out how to make a batch of cheese fondue for one person is completely beyond me. Oh well.

I'll throw one last picture onto this post. This is a picture of the three of us in front of the crepe place on our final morning in San Clemente.