Spring Break

This week was spring break for the boys. We spent the week in Florida with my parents. They rented a very nice condo on the beach. Unfortunately, the boys and I had to travel late at night and early in the morning to get reasonable air fares. We had planned for better weather, but we had the Florida equivalent of a Chicago lake breeze. The temperatures were actually cooler on the beach than at home in Skokie. There was still plenty of sun, however, so we all ended up with sunburns. That was definitely not planned.

Today is Tim's birthday. He would have been 43. The boys and I chose not to formally mark the day, but Tim was definitely on our minds. Tim was not a big beach fan. He didn't care for the feel of sand between his toes and usually wore tennis shoes when we'd go for walks on the beach. However, there were two things he always liked to do when we would go visit my parents. Tim loved to fly kites, particularly two-line steerable kites. I had packed a few kites. Since we did have such a strong breeze, the kids and I took turns flying Tim's favorite kite. Then we put up a single line kite with a lot of line laundry. Line laundry is what you call things like wind socks and spinners that you attach to the kite line with clips. The kite carries them up into the sky. We put up two wind socks, two small spinners and a giant circular spinner. They attracted a lot of attention, which is the whole idea, of course.

The other thing Tim enjoyed doing at the beach was building elaborate sand castles. I always found this a little hard to reconcile with his dislike of sand, but accepted it as one of those quirks that made Tim who he was. I have many pictures of Tim with sand castles built over the course of our marriage. So of course the boys and I built a sand castle. We went out just before high tide and built our castle right at the high tide mark. I don't ever remember doing this with Tim before, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. We all enjoyed watching the tide gradually undermine and wash away our castle. It was a lot better than abandoning our sculpture and hoping that no one would crush it. I even found it more satisfying than the Godzilla imitation that the boys were planning.