With the Fish

Today we made our longest day trip since Sava was an infant when we took my mom to Muir Woods. It's Father's Day, and on a whim we decided to mark it by making the eighty-mile drive down to Monterey in order to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Sava napped on the way there, but once he got off the car, the fresh ocean air seemed to turn him into a little monster--a little squirmy sea monster, who would not sit still or even pause to find out why we had traveled the whole long way in order to pay $46+ and enter a big building with lots of fish. He can't walk by himself yet, but he would walk while grasping someone's finger, and as he does that, he would NOT be told where to walk or what to do; he would throw himself on the floor each time we tried to redirect him, making the meaning of "throwing a fit" quite literal. Long story short, we spent all of about two hours alternating whose back got to hurt for ten minutes as we stooped and held his hand--or, on the rare occasions that he allowed, carried him--and we barely got to see anything more than a fish here and a crab there while we made sure that no one trampled him, he being all of about thirty inches tall and the aquarium dark in order to create an oceanic feeling. Oceanic is not exactly how we felt, but from time to time we managed to laugh at our helplessness. Here we were, at the mercy of a fourteen-month old who was probably cranky because he is growing a sixth tooth...We also decided that, as soon as we got home, we would look into books that promise to teach you how to deal with toddlers.