Beach Week By the Numbers

1 - number of hours I walked from our beach house to a very lame playground and back. I carried both children - Lula in the bjorn and Lumpyhead on my hip - along a fairly busy road for half of the journey. Lumpyhead discovered that whining constantly at a certain pitch will drive his mother insane, and the only way I could combat the whining was a change of scenery. I knew there was a playground around somewhere, I just thought it was closer. I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

2 - number of DVD players where Lumpyhead would stand and whine for videos. Awesome.
Me: Want to go the beach? Want to swim in the pool?
Lumpyhead: I watch Blue Thomas? I watch Yellow Thomas? I watch Letter Factory? I watch Blue Thomas? I watch Yellow Thomas? I watch Letter Factory? [repeat. By the end of the week, add Monsters, Inc., Toy Story and Yo Gabba Gabba to the litany, and ratchet the whining up a few notches.]

3 - number of “Ron Paul for President” signs I saw on the Outer Banks. Seriously, Outer Banks? Ron Paul?

4 - number of minivans we saw that were the same color, make and model as Sarah’s while we were trying to catch up with her on the ride to the beach. (We left later than we said we would, she did not.)

Coincidentally, four is also the number of dead animals we saw on the road during that same span. Later we saw a truckload of busted watermelons, prompting dueling voicemails - Sarah asking me if she’d missed some kind of roving Gallagher show, and me asking her if watermelons counted as roadkill if you weren’t a vegetarian.

5 - for a span of about sixteen hours, the number of adults present to wrangle seven children. (See 7. And 10) Those few hours nearly killed me. (See 1)

6 - the first number on the clock when Lumpyhead decided to wake up every morning at the beach. I realize that to some of you this doesn’t seem like a very big deal, but for a mother whose child usually sleeps until 8, often 9, this is a Very. Big. Deal. I don’t know why Lumpyhead decides he must wake up at the ass-crack of dawn only when we’re on vacation - it may have something to do with his room at home being very dark - but it bites the big one in my view. (If your child usually wakes up at 6, and you’re busy rolling your eyes at me right now, imagine what it would be like if your child decided to wake up at 3am when you went on vacation. Go ahead, imagine. [pause.] See? So there.)

7 - number of children between the ages of four and seven months at the beach house. Behold:
Front Row: me, Lumpyhead, Aunt Bob's Little Guy, Lula, Aunt Bob and Claudia
Middle: Squeak and his little brother Jumbo (they are 14 months apart, Jumbo is about five months older than Lumpyhead)
Back: Sarah and Ian

8 - number of adults we planned on having at the beach house. (Gabe couldn’t make it. Booooo.)

9 - number of adults we should have had at the beach house, at all times. At least.

10 -the number of hours Bump drove to attend a preschool orientation meeting in the middle of the week. (Yeah, I thought he was crazy, too, mostly because it meant that he left me to deal with our two yowling children in an unfamiliar environment. Thank God there were other parents there, or I would have lost my damn mind.) Bump felt it was important he attend this meeting, so he drove back to DC on Thursday and took Peter with him. We managed not to burn the house down while they were gone, but that’s all I’m gonna say about it. At least Bump came back; Peter didn’t.

23 - number of dollars per hour the babysitting service would have charged to watch all seven kids. The service we never used. The service we will use, as God is my witness, next year.

37 (approx.) - number of times Lumpyhead asked for Yo Gabba Gabba between the moment the Goon Squad left with the DVD and the moment we were able to fire up the show on our Tivo.

220 (approx.) - the number of times Lumpyhead has asked for Yo Gabba Gabba since we showed him it was available on his very own TV.

298 - number of pictures I took on our hectic, hysterical, very fun vacation.