Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Bear Lake Charlie


I’ve got heartburn w/ many of you out in blogland, this poll was the worst idea in the history of earth. About as bad as standing on an Aircraft Carrier in the middle of a war and saying "Mission accomplished!" It was intended to be a sure-fire implement to get my wife to post. Many of you shout from the heavens proclaiming your love for her posts, I thought that if left to the people it would be a done deal. Apparently not, 59% of you are idiots. Some have suggested (Whit) that this poll was a tool for me to glean praise, compliment and reassurance. I would have expected that you knew me better (Whit). For those of you that may not know me w/ the intimacy of my Senior Ball date rest assured that Rob’s ego needs no additional stroking as he is quite adept at personally bolstering his self-esteem and any additional complementation is icing on the cake. However, as a good sport I will concede and offer my best effort to give Charlie’s Bear Lake trip a voice.
**Disclaimer: Had you voted for Angel the following post would have been filled with all sorts of interesting details written with such exactness and piquancy that NASA engineers would be left blushing. Instead 59% of you have asked for tangent filled inane ramblings loaded with vast amounts of pretentious diction and manufactured verbiage only understood by the voices in my head.**
Charlie was, as Britton would say, "wicked stoked" to go on his first trip since he got sick. I know this because he told me. I wish. Actually one could deduce his excitement by his demeanor while enroute. He was the most pleasant little boy and did famously on the 2 ½ hour roadie up to Sweetwater. This was in large part to the engineering done by his mother to get the feed bag up and running in the truck. Once we got to the condo Char had a little snooze while the orchestra of unpacking started. You know what this post sucks already. I sound like a Missionary giving a mediocre travel log at his homecoming and if I keep it up you’ll feel obligated to come up afterwards, shake my hand, say welcome home and tell me what a great job I did on my talk then come to my house and eat my food. I don’t want that and I don’t think you do either.
Lets talk about highlights. Charlie went swimming and didn’t hate it. I did. I was more than a bit squeamish about letting him in the urine filled pitri dish of a kiddy pool, however his mother was not. She had confidence in the professional opinion of Charlie’s doctors that swimming pools were ok. So it was a little backstroke for Char while Britton showed me all the new tricks he has learned since he enrolled in swim lessons. He’s so advanced and he’ll be the first to tell you that he’s a level 2 swimmer (all you have to do is put your head under the water and blow bubbles to pass level 1). Another highlight of the trip that was amazing to me was how well our little man did with playing musical Charlie. All weekend he was cyclically passed from Mom to G-ma to Aunt to Cousin to Dad to random stranger to Uncle to Brother to Cousin and tolerated it way better than in the past. Sure he still gets over stimulated pretty easy but he’s improving. I think Charlie’s best Bear Lake experience was that he was able to enjoy the time-honored tradition of a nice long afternoon snooze down on the beach. When he woke up he and his mom played in the sand for a bit and I think it was well received. We debated on whether or not to take him for a boat ride but with the condition of his vestibular system still a question we opted not. The trip was a quick one, we usually go for a week and although we were only there for 2 days we still took the full weeks rations and put a pretty good dent in it, I think it was worth it. Angel may tell you a different story but only because she did 99.9% of the work in getting us there and making sure everyone had fun. I was busy putting the fear of the Almighty into nieces and nephews and braking Rod’s wakeboard tower. Thanks for a fun trip toots.
Now for all of Charlie’s blog peeps I hope that you will consider the marginality of this post when asked in the future whom you’d like to hear from.