On Wednesday we drove back to Balboa Park and watched a puppet show at the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theater.
Then we headed over to Mission Beach to visit with my cousin, Jodi, and her son, Ty.
We had the most amazing time with Jodi and Ty. Ty taught Abe how to boogie board, and after an hour I started to fear Abe would never return to shore. He loved boogie boarding so much. In the meantime, Jodi and I had fun visiting while we watched the kids.
When Abe returned, he helped with Clarissa, who was getting fussy. He decided to try to get her to sleep in the stroller, which he pushed back and forth in the sand. In the meantime, the girls were playing in the shallow part of the waves. At one point, I turned my back on them to check to see if Clarissa had indeed fallen asleep.
When I turned back around, Lydia and Mary were gone. Instead of seeing my girls playing in shallow waves, I saw waves twice the size of the girls in the exact spot where they had been playing a minute earlier. Only I didn’t see my girls. At that very moment, a lifeguard on a jet ski was patrolling the spot where my girls had been because there was a riptide slightly further out. I ran into the water and waved him down and asked him if he had seen my two girls. People on the beach started looking worried, and Jodi came up to me and kept repeating that the girls were okay, that they probably had just gotten lost on the beach, and that we would find them soon.
I was seriously going out of my mind at that point. I was sure they were dead, and I was hyperventilating and starting to panic-cry. Abe began running down the beach looking for the girls while Ty looked after Ammon, and a minute later he came back…with two very frightened little girls.
Mary and Lydia had somehow gotten lost on the beach and wandered away from us, and when they saw how scared we all were, I think they learned right away to respect the ocean waves just a little more. For the rest of the trip Mary refused to get more than her feet wet in the waves.
I was so, so, so thankful that they were alive. I had to sit down and calm down after thinking they were dead. It was a horrible episode.
Thankfully there was no one better to be with than Jodi and Ty. They are so fun and cheerful that pretty soon I felt recovered. We spent a little more time playing–but this time I never took my eyes off of the kids, and neither did Abe. After we were done in the ocean, we walked to the car and got changed. Then we re-met Jodi and Ty at the boardwalk and walked to a restaurant right on the beach.
We had a great dinner there and enjoyed visiting so much. I was so happy to have that time with my cousin and her son!
After we parted with Jodi and Ty, we drove to a laundromat and threw all of our sandy things in the laundry, along with all of the dirty clothes from our trip. In the meantime, I was texting with my friend, Amelia, and trying to coordinate a meet-up.
We finally met up at 11:30pm at the aptly named Extraordinary Desserts. I haven’t seen Amelia since she visited me in Boston in 2008. It has been TEN years!!! I couldn’t believe it. It was one of the highlight of my trip to meet up with Amelia and reconnect. I just love and admire her so much. We got our extraordinary desserts (mine was a plum cheesecake crumble sort of thing) and ate outside. Abe parked right next to us, so we were ten feet from our sleeping children while we all visited. The late hour was completely and totally worth every minute with Amelia. Next time I hope to meet her partner, Belinda, too.
