Saturday at Latasan

Saturday, September 17, we decided we needed a break and called a friend to ask if we could drop in on him at his beach house. Fred had been asking us for the longest time to just bring the kids over but there was always something else going on which prevented us from enjoying his hospitality.

The kids, settled in front of the tv for Saturday morning cartoons, understandably started whining "What? You're stressed and so we all have to go to the beach?" :-) Jordi was right, too. You'd think I'd enjoy the beach more if I wasn't always making sure they were within sight and reach, having been trained how to do this every summer over the course of years by my wonderful aunts from Dipolog, but no, not likely. Images of them sitting zombified in front of the tv would've haunted me and I wouldn't have been able to focus on the view. So packed into the car went we.

We got there about noon, told the kids to stay in the house until it wasn't too hot, bustled (another word I've long wanted to use. it reminds me of The Little House on the Prairie) in the kitchen, got lunch spread out, and by the time I sat down to eat, they'd gone into "there's nothing to do here!" Fortunately, right beside the kitchen I found an entire 6-foot bookcase filled with Fred's son's very good collection of children's books. After shouts of "Mom! He has Roald Dahl!" and "Mom! He has LOTS of Roald Dahl!", both boys settled into the conveniently positioned and comfortably sized rocking chairs for 2 solid hours of reading, believe it or not.

After that, and since it still wasn't cool enough yet, Fred showed them his attack-trained dogs. This is as close as we could get, or would ever want to get, to them: tossing pieces of bread, right at that spot.

All this time, Jong napped on this suspended sofa-swing. The breeze was blowing in from the beach, too. :-)