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Wednesday, September 03, 2008

I'll cry if I want to

Well, I didn't end up getting funnel cake in Myrtle Beach. It was too dang hot, ya'll! But the trip was a success without the fried deliciousness. We went with our friends and their two girls, so we were a merry party of seven.

Myrtle Beach is like many East Coast beach towns: lovely houses, cheesy stores, lots of ice cream, cheap t-shirts, odd amusements, and the beach. We ate at Friendly's when we arrived (I know, very exotic, but the baby was having a meltdown, and the parking lot was empty--a match made in heaven!) and then proceeded to walk to the boardwalk. Once there, we played skee ball (me, badly, the husband, annoyingly well) at an arcade with the kiddies. Then we visited the Gay Dolphin, "the largest on the East Coast" (I know, right?), a "gift" emporium filled with "treasures" on every surface that reminded several of us of some of our mother's or grandmother's houses. You know the kind of stuff I mean: painted sand dollars, glass dolphins, shell jewelry, preserved alligator heads, the usual. I found it hard to resist the back scratcher made out of a preserved alligator claw, but I did manage to walk away.

Next, the kids and the dads (minus J) went to the mirror maze, where they wandered around disoriented with the help of unhelpful disorienting glasses while the moms went to a nearby ice cream parlor to cool off and feed the baby. Later, we went down to the beach, where the girls swam and played in the sand, and J decided wet sand was fine but water rushing in over his toes was decidedly NOT fine. Overall, though, J performed remarkably well throughout the whole day, most of which he spent in his new backpack carrier, which he loves because it makes him as tall as everyone else. We went to Outback for dinner after wandering back down the boardwalk and ate dinner at Outback on the way back home. All in all, a fun trip.

Unfortunately, the one souvenir we did bring home from the beach was a sinus infection for J, his first illness requiring antibiotics and his first real sickness of any kind, not counting jaundice. He slept in the car on the way home, but then was unable to breathe and gasped his way through the night, meaning we both slept not at all. In the morning, I took him to the doctor, who gave us an antibiotic and recommended tylenol, benadryl, a decongestant, and saline drops (drugs, much?). He was miserable all day and most of the night but now seems to be on the mend...ish. Poor baby! It's so hard to hear him gasping and wheezing and struggling to sleep! Frown!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hello to a fellow South Carolinian! A sinus infection for a baby makes the mom feel SO very helpless. Actually, any illness in a baby creates the same feeling, doesn't it?