Victoria, Victoria

I am typing this from a hotel room in downtown Victoria, British Columbia.  Dean and the kids are playing a game and I am taking advantage of free wi-fi.  This year, instead of the traditional extended family Thanksgiving celebration, we opted to pack up and leave town for a few days.  We journeyed to Victoria today.  It wasn't planes, trains and automobiles, but instead automobiles and ferry boats.  As I sit here, I can hear that Annika is growing very tired and stressed as they try to play the game of Life.  The day has gone relatively well until now.  I wonder if we will ever be able to travel as a family without causing this child so much stress and angst.  So close and yet so far.

Later, we looked at this picture and went 'who are those old people??'

Up to this point, the day was overall a good day.  We left the house early this morning and crossed the border into Canada, driving to the B.C. Ferry terminal.  The weather is cold, but we bundled up as we walked the streets of Victoria.  We toured a castle, had a snack in Chinatown and took pictures of the frozen fountain in front of the Parliament Building.  Along the way we laughed and sometimes got annoyed with each other.  Our children always keep us hoping, no matter how grown up they are.  The things of today that I find noteworthy...

1)  When it was time to leave the house this morning, Josh was still in his flannel pj pants.  No worries, he simply pulled his jeans over his pj pants, telling us that if he got warm, he could always take them off.  He went thru the entire day wearing 2 pairs of pants, flannel and jeans.  I am also pretty sure that the suitcase he brought home is filled with dirty laundry that he is just sorting thru and recyling while we are on our little mini-vacay.  At least he didn't participate in 'no shave November' this year.  I may actually be able to get a Christmas card picture that I don't have to mail out with a disclaimer.  Oh, and his muttering to himself is now done in French and/or Italian. It took me a while to realize that his muttering was now being done in a different language, I kept trying to keep up.  Silly me.

2)  Kirsten has a cold and refuses to blow her nose. I sat in front of her for several hours in the car.  I was reminded of when she had a cold as a young toddler and I had to suck the snot out of her nose (with a bulb syringe) because she refused to blow her nose into a kleenex.  Then there was the time we were vacationing in Whistler and Dean had to leave the condo late at night in search of Vicks rub because someone refused to blow their nose and was crying because they were stuffed up.  Oh yes, the sinus issues, and the refusal to deal with them by merely blowing into a kleenex still continue. Kirsten also uses her outloud voice a little too much at times.  I'm learning that she just says things just to have them noted, she doesn't expect me to fix anything.  It has only taken me 17 years to figure that one out.

3)  Annika does best if she can sit in the third seat of the car, alone.  She plugs in to her Ipod, her Nintendo DS and is quite happy.  However, being her mother's daughter, she still feels the need to hear EVERY word that is spoken in the car.  This wouldn't be so bad if she didn't have EAR PHONES IN HER EARS.  The constant 'WHAT?' from the far back corner of the car can sometimes make us shout 'ANNIKA WE AREN'T TALKING TO YOU' more than we should.

4)  Dean is afraid of me.  He admits it.  Not all the time, just certain times.  Mainly he is afraid of getting lost when we are traveling.  It isn't that he is afraid for himself or the rest of us to not know where exactly we are the ENTIRE time we travel, he likes to figure things out Amazing Race style.  The reality is that he is afraid of what I WILL DO if we get lost.  Being lost is something that I don't handle well, AT ALL.  I panic.  We have had many,many arguments over the years when we head out somewhere and he hasn't done all the research of how to get from Point A to Point B.  Today, we managed to get from Point A to Point B and C and D and E without any issue.  Of course that is because I had printed out directions before we left home, AND we grabbed a map on the ferry.   I was glad that I didn't have to make my husband frightened by my panic.

Fan Tan Alley, Chinatown

5)  I've developed an irrational fear of falling.  For years I have had a recurring nightmare where I fall to my death.  Not an unusual dream, Freud even covered it for crying out loud.  More recently that fear of falling has entered my conscious world in an extreme way.  When the kids were little I was overly cautious with them around any open, potential fall hazard area.  That fear never really subsided with Annika.  I think mainly because she tends to be the proverbial bull in a china closet as she goes thru life.  Tripping, running into things, falling.  Today, as we toured the castle, which had a center staircase that rose the 5 flights thru the center of the house, I FREAKED when she got near the inner edge and was looking down thru that spiral center of stair tread.  I worried that she would somehow throw herself over the railing's edge and plummet thru that center to the first floor.  Irrational? Yes. Real to me? Yes.  I think I might have something new to explore in a therapy context...my irrational fear of falling.  Note:  She didn't trip and fall and we all made it out of the castle, each in one piece.  However, I ascended and descended the stairs hugging the wall, not the open center.

6)  Our hotel has a cozy bar that serves wine at 1/2 price on Wednesday.  The best part???  The kids are all underage and so they had to stay in our room when we got to sample and talk, uninterrupted.

I wonder what will happen tomorrow.