Old School Baby Leash

August 2011

It is the eve of my family vacation.  Destination: Lake Winnipesaukee.  Me and my wife Laura have been going up to New Hampshire every year for over a decade.  One of our best friend's parents have a house near Meredith and its doors have long been open to the two (now five) of us.  These trips are not quite the carefree and relaxed excursions they once were and do not entail anywhere near the same amount of debauchery.  

For instance, as a father now it is highly unlikely that I would ever wake up with nothing on but a bathmat wrapped around my waist,  in a different room than the one I went to sleep in, mere feet from a man I met only the night before.  First impressions, baby!  I rule at those.

No, on trips like these now, as evening descends I often feel like I never stopped running the entire day.  Kieran and Mason are now at that perfectly harrowing stage where, when outside of the comfort of our happy home, they are constantly only inches away from something that would elicit a visit to the ER.  In our house everything remotely fragile, sharp, electrical, potentially noose-like or anything that could conceivably cause a mess resides in elevated locations piled high, or beyond impassable gates.  The rest of the world does not live with these stringent security measures.  It's also a bit exhausting wondering if your hosts are wondering the entire time if life just may have been a little nicer if that gaggle of Driscolls hadn't been invited.  At home when the boys decide to turn their morning milk into a soggy carpet-bog, while it's gross, it's your carpet and your kids and it's over.  When one of those angels sent from above decides to dissect their diaper, leaving literally millions of tiny, white and wet beads trailing throughout your entire house, you just deal with it.  Events like these when away create a fair amount of stress and a bit of embarrassment as well.

So as I just sat here thinking about some tactics to utilize this week -- ones that will minimize health risks and apologies, thus increasing fun and a state of chillaxation -- I thought of a story involving my paternal grandmother.

My father was one of eight.  Just as an aside, my mother had eight younger siblings.  Big fam, eh?  But I digress, this story is about my pops' side of the fam.  When he was four or five the family spent the summer at a lake house.  In addition to my father my grandparents then had a newborn baby girl and my Uncle Walt, two years younger than my dad.  It was this summer that Walt would begin a trend of reckless behavior that would last until he reached young adulthood.  Whenever the family was outdoors my father's closest sibling would run full speed towards the lake, out onto the dock and then right off it, into the water where he would sink to the bottom and have to be saved from certain death.  Apparently, he repeated this act over and over again until my grandparents came up with a simple solution.

They got a long length of rope and tied one end around the trunk of a tree in the yard.  The other end was wrapped around the toddlers waist secured in an efficient and squirm-proof knot (my grandfather was in the Coast Guard -- he knew knots).  Voila, this effectively ended all stress caused by the whole jumping in the lake ordeal.  

Yep, my uncle spent much of the summer of either 1953 or '54 fastened safely to a tree.  Ah, the good old days.

To be honest, my excitement towards spending a week away in the woods with my family -- swimming; fishing; boating; smores-ing -- far exceeds any anxiety I may have at the thought of spending my days chasing and saving my little guys.  These trips are what it's all about: creating lifelong memories.

I plan on blogging during afternoon naps so keep an eye out if you're actually somehow interested in my nutty life. 

First fish ever!

Smores-ing