family time

There really is nothing like getting hypothermia on an old time steam engine going 6.5 mph around a 14 mile track after you have just been soaked to the bone by giggling teenagers shooting giant water guns at you on a raft ride. Unless you are getting hypothermic with all of your favorite people, the train car is open air, and you get held up half way through the ride by a couple of bad actors and sprayed again with freezing water during their badly improvised skit.

We went to Silverwood yesterday, we, being the entire Stecker conglomeration minus Josh, Lindsey and Ben. It was a beautiful exercise in good parenting, patience building and white trash tolerance. We had a really good day, the kids were all good. Mostly. Nattie had a hard time because she had to spend some time riding on the "boring" rides since everybody didn't want to spend all day on the biggest baddest ones. But she survived.

I fell asleep at the pool. The kiddie pool. The one with a multitude of little sprinklers that small children and males of all ages like to stand and put their hands over in various conformation to see how far into the sleeping parents they can make the water shoot. I woke up when they were playing Peter Paul and Mary and I was worried that I had accidentally slept into the Christmas season since that is the only time I ever hear Peter Paul and Mary anymore. Turns out they were just sandwiched between the beach boys and simon and garfunkel in the boulder beach mix, so I had really only been asleep for a few minutes. It's hard to tell except by the sunburn degrees on the backs of the albino children from Canada playing under the sprinklers. I know a couple of them had escalated to second degree while my eyes were closed so it must have been at least 15 minutes. Or so. Either way, it was nice. And the strange thing was that I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything. As far as I know, no one drowned while I was passed out, and although MacKenzie abandoned Natalee in the wave pool to come back for lunch, she was recovered when an all-stecker search party hit the waves and combed the shoulder to shoulder crowd for a little blonde in a turquoise swim suit. Turns out there were at least fifteen that fit that description in the pool. But we found her, and MacKenzie will NEVER leave her sister alone in a wave pool again. But nobody said anything about the lazy river, so we had to track the delinquent nine year old down again, bobbing through blue floating doughnuts and short blondes in turquoise swim suits around the eternal loop of pee-warm water. Once again MacKenzie was insulted by the reference to her lack of understanding of the buddy system, and insisted that she would just stay with the stroller for the rest of the day and hold the baby who had less propensity for wandering off and getting lost in a sea of look-a-likes.

The kids were really good though. I had to make Halle take off a couple of the three tank tops she had on over and under her full coverage tankini so that she wouldn't die of heat stroke, but she was apparently concerned about violating marble modesty standards, which I insisted weren't enforced at Silverwood, pointing out the 19 year old that actually had boobs and wasn't wearing a swimming suit at all, as far as anyone could tell.

Steckers are funny people. As much as you thin the blood down you can never fully escape the treasure hunting, trash hoarding, quirky sense of value that we inherited from our fathers. Or their parents. It was interesting to me that with all of the rides and activities there were at the theme park, the three younger kids were just as well entertained by three plastic chairs and a beach towel as they were by egg scramblers and tilt-a-whirls. Between the pool furniture and Baby Judah I am not sure that we would have had to pay for tickets to a theme park at all. They would probably have been just as happy if we had set some lawn chairs and judah in a stroller out in my parents driveway for them to fight over. I guess the problem with that is the high probability of Judah being injured on the 60% grade driveway in a stroller with wheels and 6 curious young relatives all arguing about which way he should be facing. Maybe a padded, hoseable room with a drain in the middle and velcro strips for hanging misbehaving children on really is the way to go. If we saved all of the dollars we spent on entertaining them elsewhere it would probably pay for itself a thousand times over. Especially in a self-contained, soundproof building with hidden spy-cams and an entertainment system with self-starting DVDs (which obviously skip the previews) in the ceiling and out of reach of all of them.

We live in such a silly, disposable world. full of disposable relationships and disposable entertainment. I hope with each day that goes by, and every choice that I make, that the memories that we form, me and mine, are not disposable. That they echo through time with the solidarity of an ancient sequoia. I pray, to god, the universe, the powers that be, my own will, that I will waste no more time, no more passion in disposable things, and the pieces of my heart will pile up in a cosmic landfill of worthless events and things that don't matter. I wish that every day that belongs to me, from this one out, is memorable and full. And that even the bad things leave the taste of meaning in my mouth.