Mini Weekend
It'll become obvious in a minute, when your RSS feeds get flodded with posts, that I'm in the process of clearing out the blogjam I'd intended to clear out last week. Yay for moving Tuesday's drama off the front page with more frivolous things!
So one of the things that was more topical a couple weeks ago but that I'm going to persist in writing about now was our weekend adventure to Atlantic City. Earlier that week the Beaner was raving about the maroon convertible Mini that Aura's husband had bought for him, and it occurred to me that perhaps the car share had a real convertible Mini that we could reserve for an hour. I looked it up, and it'd only about $15 to rent one for an hour on Sunday, so I made a mental note to mention it to Al.
I forgot to mention it, of course, and as the weekend drew near, Al told me that the team off-site he'd be attending in Atlantic City on Monday and Tuesday started at 8:30am Monday morning, and that some people were getting hotel rooms for Sunday. I said, "maybe we could go with you, just for the day!" It was kind of a goofy idea, but I was thinking: seaside resort, two swimming pools, woo! The Beaner would love it, and it'd be a fun family adventure. That's when I remembered about the convertible Mini. I checked the carshare website to see if we could reserve the Mini for Saturday instead, but it was booked.
Meanwhile, Al and I were trying to figure out how to swing all of us going to AC on Sunday -- either he or the Beaner and I would need to take the train back -- when it occurred to us to see whether a non-convertible Mini was available. The idea of driving two cars down there seemed a bit wasteful to me, but it appealed to Al, and the Beaner would get a longer Mini ride. Long story short: the Mini was available, the price was affordable, and off to AC we went.
The adventure required that we get an easy-to-move-from-one-car-to-another booster seat, which we'd been wanting to get anyway, so that was a nice bonus. It cracked me up when the Beaner asked, "Where did we get this boopster seat?" We used to—and still sometimes do—call him The Boopster, so it seemed fitting to call it the Boopster Seat. He's not totally sold on the lap belt—he prefers the 5-point harness on his old seat—but once we discovered the pop-up arm rests, his other objection to it was silenced.
We ended up having a nice day at Seaview in Galloway, NJ; the Beaner got to swim with me in the outdoor pool and with his dad in the indoor one, and he even got to try out his putting. The drive back to Philly on Monday morning was easy, and I was able to drop the Beaner off at sharecare, drop off our bags and boopster seat, return the car, and stop at Trader Joe's on the walk home, and still be at my desk before 11am.
I did wonder why my shoulders were so sore for a couple days afterwards, however; finally it dawned on me that it was from catching the Beaner as he jumped into the pool oh, about 100 times. The belly laughs were worth the shoulder aches, though—I found that I couldn't help but bust out laughing every time he made the leap. As I pulled him out of the water for about the 12th time, I said, "you CRACK ME UP!" He said, "no, YOU crack ME up! Hee hee!" Joy.