Skip to main content

Willow meets the king of the dougs

We're back from Beach Trip No. 2, this one to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. Everyone had a good time, and we all enjoyed our time with family.
Even though that was the big highlight of the trip, time with family, for Che, Willow and me, Willow might bend your ear more about another thing that happened on the vacation (if Willow could say more than "dadadada," that is).
Che and I know spending time with family was Willow's favorite part of both our beach trips, but her second-favorite part of the trip to the Outer Banks wasn't the sand or the toys or the pool or the surf or the sun or the bike rides.
No, siree, Bob.
If our little chatterbox could actually put together sentences that you and I could understand, she'd go on and on about the hulking gray puppy dog of a great dane we saw at Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. We saw the pup as we were getting pictures in front of the lighthouse after some of us climbed its 257 steps (then dizzyingly descended those same steps).
Once she spotted the dog in the distance, she took off after it, pointing and saying, "Doug!" (as she does with ducks, dogs, men named Doug and, now, canine-breathed horses). The owner saw Willow and her cousins approaching and, to her credit, she didn't high-tail it out of there. She let the kiddos approach then pet the dog.
Willow (who came up to the pup's knees, I think) was content to stand six inches from the dog and just stare. She had a wickedly gleeful look on her face the whole time. It's as if she'd been living all her 14 months to get to this point, standing beside the biggest dog known to man (at least the biggest one known to me). I don't think it gets any better than that for a dog-loving toddler.
I forget the dog's name, and I don't have pictures right now of the encounter, but I'm sure one of us documented the meeting on one of our phones or cameras (heck, maybe I did, but I don't recall, and we, meaning Cherish, haven't had time to go through the pics yet).
After several minutes, we finally unglued the kids from the scene and let the owner and her 2-year-old beast reclaim their quiet moment in the blazing shade.
As we were walking away, I could see it in Willow's eyes; she'd just had the time of her life.
And I think she was walking just a bit taller.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

With baby comes packing (and a lot of it)

Willow, Che and I are traveling to see the grandparents, aunts, cousins and Mos (or is it Moes or is it Mo's or is it Moses?) in Henderson, Tenn., this weekend. And that brings up one of the big differences between being a couple without kids and being a couple with kids: packing for travel (they even have an app for that, God bless us packing-weary parents). Back in my pre-child days, packing hardly mattered, probably taking up 1 zillionth of a tenth of a percent of my brain capacity to do (six days equals six days of socks and underwear plus some T-shirts, some shorts, a pair or two of pants, put on some shoes, throw in some toothpaste, and I was off). That's hardly the case anymore. Take, for example, if you have a spit-up-prone baby. Do you take two burp clothes, four, eight or, maybe, 16? Better take 24. And how many diapers do you take? Or wipes? Do I need to take baby medicine? Is it going to be cold or warm or cold and warm or warm and hot then ... AACK!!! You get t...

Willow hones her friend-making skills

Up until now Willow has enjoyed the company of other tots her age only in the sense that where they are is where the fun and the toys are. That is to say she likes the toys and the gyms and the swings and if she has to be around these other toddlers, so be it. That's with kids her own age. She LOVES older kids, but they don't care much for her (other than "she's a baby," and Willow can't keep up with them, though she tries). Her older cousin, Rett, for example, hung the stars and moon in her opinion, so she'll just about do anything he does, including cozying up with him on the chair to watch a movie. And he does like her more than the typical older kid does. But as far as all the toddlers and babies roughly in Willow's age range, she doesn't have much use for them. She's not mean to them. She'll let them take a ball from her hand, for example (as some say, she plays well with others). But I can tell you, most definitely, she just doesn...

Summer zips on by

I guess it's official. This morning, we witnessed the kiddos hopping on school buses and heading to school. That marks the end of summer, I suppose, and the end of summer seems to come a little earlier every year (even though the actual warmness of the weather keeps creeping later and later; are we going to have winter this year, anyone?). Call me silly, but I like to think of the end of summer as that day on the calendar that falls in the middle of September, after my birthday (my birthday, Sept. 16, is in summer, but it has never, ever felt that way even though I know it's always hot on my birthday). This marks my 39th summer if you count that first one I was born during in 1974, and I'm sure many of them seemed really long or really short depending on how old I was. For me, it seemed like the summers of my childhood lasted FOREVER. Now it seems like they zip by. In a flash. Especially this one. It's been a busy one, filled with lots of travels, family visits and...