Thursday, July 28, 1994...Dentist Visit

Monday Joseph and Lydia had to visit the dentist. Poor Joseph sat with his mouth open for two hours, and Monday night and Tuesday, his mouth--really, his whole head--hurt. Lydia had two cavities, but fortunately they were not very deep. They put porcelain sealant on several teeth to prevent cavities, and she took all this like a trooper.

Once, when the nurse was rinsing her mouth with a water sprayer, she sprayed a front tooth and gave Lydia a first-class shower, whereupon Lydia immediately ducked and screwed her eyes tight shut and clamped her mouth closed--right on the dentist’s tools. She looked just exactly like a little turtle pulling its head into its shell.

“Open,” muttered the dentist behind his mask, eyes all squinty from grinning.

Lydia didn’t move.

“Open wide!” the nurse said cheerfully, “you’re biting doctor!” and Lydia’s eyes and mouth simultaneously popped wide open, and she stared at the doctor to see just what he thought of her trying to “eat up his machines,” as she said later.

I’m sewing shirts for Keith today. One is navy blue, with wild white splashes of Japanese (I guess it could be Chinese, for all I know) writing all over. I just happened to think...what does it say?! Yipe! What if it says something uncultured and he meets up with someone who can actually read this gibberish?!

I once went around wearing a cute blouse with little bare people on it (!) before my eyes suddenly focused on the confusion of dots and I realized what I was seeing. Good grief! My conservative little sensibilities were quite offended. No wonder some of my friends had perpetual alarmed looks when I visited them with that shirt on.

Yesterday a boy came to our door trying to get donations to take a trip to Cancun and the Bahamas. I was standing there feeling disgusted when Caleb burped loudly right in his face. My sentiments exactly. We didn’t run around town asking for donations for our trip. No, we worked for it.

Well, our pop-up pickup camper and our Holiday Rambler camper trailer are slowly getting loaded with all the necessities of camp life--colored pencils, coloring books, dolls, Frisbees, books, cameras, and a giant rawhide chewie for our giant rawhide dog.

Really, I did put some clothes, dishes, and blankets out there, too; but nobody but me thought those were necessities.

And guess where we’re going!! CANADA. Jasper, Banff, Kootenay, Yoho, Mt. Revelstoke, and Glacier National Parks. On our way, we’ll go through the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, which is where we went last year.

Let me tell you, this is High Excitement, indeed. The little girls have been playing “Vacation Trip” for weeks.

After we decided all the places we wanted to go, and all the things we wanted to see, I figured the mileage. 5,400 miles. So then we had to decide what we didn’t need to see, and where we didn’t need to go. (One cannot travel 465 miles per day through mountainous terrain with a 27-foot trailer and eight children.) After deductions, we’re down to 3800 miles of absolute Must-Sees. Now, just as soon as the crewcab gets out of the hospital, we’ll be rarin’ to go! Larry is putting a Cummins turbo diesel motor in it. (It’s gonna need it, to pull all those coloring books.) Boy, oh boy; no white-capped mountain peaks will be able to stymie us!

My mother has been fretting and stewing over our impending vacation; I think she expects us to feed several of the kids to the grizzlies. After all, grizzlies are a threatened species; kids are not. She doesn’t realize that after all those years of making me feel corralled (restraining me from wading too deeply into the ocean, or following mountain trails near wolf lairs, or standing on the brink of the Grand Canyon), causing me to chafe at the bit, now I’ve become a lot like her--probably creating the same sort of exasperation in my own offspring.

As we walked past the candy display in the grocery store yesterday, Teddy asked, “Have you ever had a Charleston Chew?”

“No,” I replied.

“Well,” he informed me, “you could get all the way to Charleston before you got done chewing it.”

We are now the proud owners of a big Yamaha Venture Royal. (That’s a motorcycle, by the way.) How do you s’poze we’re gonna take everybody somewhere on that? Do they still make those Laurel-and-Hardy-type sidecars? And, would that many sidecars be legal?

Maybe pull-behind wagons would be better.

Expect future installments on The Big Grand Vacation, Where Nothing Is Expected To Go Wrong At All.