Kids are recuperating from this latest bout of whatever the hell it is. Bacteria-itis will be my new term for any illness that results in puking or pooping. I tell you what, a boat can feel like one heck of a small place with two sick kids onboard.

We did make it over to the beach today. There is a picture in our last post of a little fisherman’s skiff, well today we were playing with the kids when I turned around and noticed that a guy well into his sixties, and maybe half my size was having trouble dragging that skiff up onto the beach. As the fishermen do here he had a big pvc pipe underneath it to help him roll it one boat length at a time up the beach, but the sand was too soft and it was low tide—he was getting nowhere. I went over, reached down and grabbed a line on the front, then confidently gave a yank while he pushed at the back. I about threw my back out.

I looked back at him and he smiled, “Muy pesado.” Very heavy.

No kidding. The boat is only like two feet wide and maybe twelve feet long, but weighed twenty-thousand pounds I’d estimate. He told me it feels light in the water. Uh-huh.

We eventually got it up to the breakwall where he unloaded and flipped it over for the night. As I walked away I smiled as I realized that I understood this old-timer fisherman pretty well based solely on words I’ve learned in our kids’ Spanish books. Thank you Sandra Boynton.

You’d think we were training Lowe for some sort of kids Iditarod. He pushes the stroller everywhere he goes. He sits in it only occasionally. At the beach he pushes it straight into the water and walks the shallows like that for hours. Nice thing about his training is that we can now load the stroller with up to fifty pounds of gear.