Weekend Journal

Earlier in the summer, Steve and I made a list of fun things that we had to do this summer. Looking over the list, many of the items weren’t necessarily my kind of fun. But the law frowns on bringing the kids along to bars on Bleeker Street, and I haven’t yet convinced the children that an afternoon of antiquing followed by a nice salad of arugula and walnuts is a rip roaring good time, so compromises were made.

Today, we crossed one item off the summer fun list. We went to a killer water park.

The water park is in the mountains of Northwestern New Jersey. (Yes, we do have mountains and green things here.) It’s a ski area, but the locals have found ways to milk money out of tourists in the summer, too. It had a giant wave pool and a dozen or so crazy water slides. Jonah and Steve went down the advanced slides. Some were so scary that Jonah could not stop talking on the stairs to the top. He gains courage by jabbering.

There were plenty of slides for Ian, too. While Jonah gets off on the adrenaline rush and the bragging rights of doing the double diamond slides, Ian gets off on the experience. He would put his butt into the innertube and slide down. Sometimes with a huge smile. Sometimes with his eyes closed feeling the pull of gravity and the sway of the water.

We were there for four and half hours, which was about an hour or two too long for Ian. It was a lot of stimulation and a lot of walking. The strange thing with super active boys is that when they get really tired, they don’t sit down like a sensible girl. No. They just go faster. They run and don’t listen. They are lobotomized, coked up demons. After a while, Ian stopped listening and was running too fast for me to keep up. He had a couple of time outs, before I located the others and forced them to leave.

Still, all in all it was a great day. Even if it didn’t involve arugula and walnuts.