Rosemary and Louis's Adventures: Port Aransas!

We won four days in a "surf shack" in Port Aransas at St. Mark's Fiesta silent auction, and so we took a trip with the kids over President's Day weekend (which, although seldom celebrated, is a four day weekend at St. Mark's!). It is about a four hour drive from Austin to the Gulf, and we had no idea what cool adventures awaited us there. Rosemary -- somewhat predictably I suppose -- as so excited to go to Port Aransas that you would have thought we were going on the Concord to Paris. She couldn't sleep the night before. Fortunately, this did not really dampen our style, and we headed down after school on Wednesday afternoon.

As Rosemary was/is starting to have some real separation anxiety/resistance to school/babysitters, it was a nice break from routine -- which had started to become daily screaming and crying at drop-off, which, without fail, makes me feel about as bad as anything. Not to diverge too much, but, as I write this, I think we've turned a corner. Its funny, Rosemary has always been relatively independent, so this "separation anxiety" (not a very accurate term for what I think she's feeling) seemed to come out of the blue. But I think she was just starting to really be aware of some big concepts -- she told James the other day that Louis is worried about him dying (doubtful), and, along the same vein, I think she's aware of the fact that we may have other things we do/think about than her! I'd say most of the stress she has been feeling has been an understandable feeling of not being in control. As James points out -- its pretty reasonable to feel scared of not being in control -- how do any of us sleep at night?!? Anyway -- we've been trying to make her feel more in control w/ calendars, making schedules of what will happen and what she'd like to do during the day, and alarm clocks (which she carried around for two days like the most interesting toy in the world), and it seems to be working.

OK back to vacation. The highlight was the first day, when we drove to the Aransas National Wildlife refuge and saw the highly endangered whooping cranes, roseate spoonbills, wild turkeys, armadillos, and alligators! More exciting, we took a sixteen mile bike ride through the park, with Rosemary riding the bike train, and the kids lasted -- cheerfully -- the whole time. It was really liberating, we felt like we were really coming back from a long hiatus of not being able to do much w/ little babies, and on to an exciting new era of adventure.