Family trip to Palm Springs. Eight cousins, some bigger cousins, two aunts and an uncle.
Water park, 120 degrees. Lilly and I are waiting at the top of a water slide and she turns around and looks like a wilting flower. "I don't feel too good, Mom," and I get the water slide dude to give her some of his water. She for sure was about to pass out from heat stroke. We learned after that to carry a water cup with us, and drink it all on the way to the slide.
The kids made me go on the Tornado which is like a huge bowl you get dumped into down a chute with 3 of your best friends on a raft together. The best part is they weigh you as a group before putting you on the raft. We wondered if there was a Fatty Alarm that went off and how horrible that would be. The only way I got through that ride was looking at Lilly's grinning face across from me on the raft through the scary falling part and the zooming upward part. Sometimes joy and reassurance comes from the easiest places, right across from you.
At the top of one slide I asked the guy as he's putting me on a raft if they made them wear long sleeves to hide tattoos or if it's for the sun. He says his boss has a lot of tattoos so he doesn't think that's the problem. He said he does it for skin cancer. "Because that shit is for real," he said.
We survive the hotness and get to the night where we're all cramming around one table with not enough chairs eating hamburgers some of us actually hovering because there's no place to sit.
When we should be going to bed, instead we're playing frisbee in the empty resort street because it's a fake vacation neighborhood and there's no cars. They tell Dima the 5 year old not to run in the street and later we're taking the street again to get to the pool and he says it's okay he's not running in the street, he's jogging. We go play tennis at 945 at night because it's only 107 out.
The next day I can barely walk, but there's more hot pool and frisbee, more food, thrift stores, the only Trader Joe's where you can park without any traffic (I go here 3 times just for the parking). At night I am laying on kids and a niece on the couch, while eating melted chocolate chips out of brownies that are on a plate on my chest. I take a tiny piece of the brownie and stick my whole hand into Bruce's milk, then put the whole dripping thing into my own face. The dripping is what makes it worth it.
There are no other things to do here like clean or maintain, really. So we just get hot, get waterlogged, eat, listen to people talk loudly, play a new card game, play tennis, play frisbee, swim, never wash, and finally get in bed.
Lilly and I seem to be the only ones who miss the regular routine of our lives, maybe because we like our actual life. The noise here is good, the family is good. But we like the maintaining of home, we're good at the peace of everyday.
