I'm writing this post on Sunday night because tomorrow we are heading to Great Wolf Lodge for a little family getaway. This may well be the most highly anticipated event in Asher's life so far, because it is with this trip that he has discovered the calendar, and perhaps on a broader level the passage of time itself. For seven weeks or so, I have been helping him count down the weeks and days until we go to 'Big Bad Wolf Swim Suit'. We put a sticker on the calendar. Dave made a chart for him to 'X' off the days, but he prefers to write a 'yes' instead (which is a wonky checkmark, often on the wrong square). And when I say 'for seven weeks', I mean '10-25 times a day for seven weeks'. Luckily, after the first week or so, he seemed to believe that we really would go, so he stopped being wildly disappointed every time I explained the calendar.
We've been visiting this particular hotel/indoor waterpark occasionally for several years now, including for Asher's first couple of birthdays. But we also went before we ever had Asher, to play with our nieces and nephew and enjoy the only-now-understood thrills of being the childless couple on family vacations. (Go eat dinner at 8 pm! Quietly! Sleep in! I can't keep writing about this or I might start crying a little with nostalgia.) What never really worked for me was the water park bit - I never liked big slides of any kind after the traumatic surprise of a 'Super Slide' at a local carnival - it was way higher and bumpier than it looked from the ground and I was never again enthused by any way of descent that didn't involve stairs. But I enjoyed the Lazy River, the Wave Pool, and playfully but definitively pushing off Dave's pleadings for me to 'just try the Howling Tornado of Death, it's really not that bad when you get up there.' No thanks, bud. Not gonna happen. Each time, I thought, 'I'm just gonna do one, I'll survive and he'll stop asking when he sees how much non-fun I had.' But I never did. I just drank Diet Coke from a bucket while I watched the kids play, and played arcade games with the rapt absorption that I can no longer muster with one eye scanning to see if Asher has climbed up into a Skee-ball machine again.
In 2010, I was taking some college classes near our home in order to apply for nursing school. I already had a BA in Sociocultural Anthropology, but the huge salary I was promised for ethnographic fieldwork had never materialized. (I thought about making a dweeby joke about getting paid in potlatch but I thought I'd embarrass myself enough by just threatening to make said joke for the .2% of people who would even get it or care, and they'd still probably correct me so it would be an utter waste. I have a lot of pride in my idealistic choice of major, but it comes with a hefty sidecar of eye-rolling at myself.)
One of the required classes was in Sociology, which I had always seen as Anthropology's second cousin who you get lumped in with at reunions but don't really enjoy too much. But I liked the class and it was easy as pie, so I was enjoying the experience. We were offered a special field trip to Huntsville, where we would tour the oldest prison in Texas, and in particular we would visit the state's execution chamber, which is the most active site of execution in the country. I was willing and intrigued, but, as I'm sure you can guess, the trip happened to fall on the week of our family's jaunt to 'Big Bad Wolf Swim Suit'. So I planned to go on the field trip (about 8 hrs long) and meet up with everyone at the end of the day, spend the night at the hotel and do the whole Wave Pool/Diet Coke/Not Watersliding thing.
But it went a little weird.
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