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Summer Fun with the Nephews

There was much swimming in the pool. Ben and Joey swam together, with Keith's parents, with Keith and with our friends' kids. As a relatively sane adult, I like to avoid the pool at all costs while there are under-twelve-year-old boys in the pool splashing, yelling and doing what boys that age do.

On Saturday morning, we all loaded up in the cars with hats, cameras, sunscreen and binoculars, and drove to Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, which is on the Cape just north of Kennedy Space Center. We spent a full morning there hiking a few trails, doing a fair amount of bird watching (we saw plenty of cotton-candy-colored roseate spoonbills and an osprey ripping his live fish lunch to shreds), and gawking at some alligators, frolicking manatees, and a friendly gopher tortoise.

At the beginning of our visit to MINWR, Keith was given an opportunity to be my hero when I dropped my sunglasses off a boardwalk and into an alligator lagoon. While Keith's dad and the friendly MINWR volunteer guy tried to fish out the glasses with an awkward contraption, Keith watched the glasses sink further and further into the muck at the bottom of the lagoon as I fretted over the loss of my favorite sunglasses. My hero finally shed his shoes and jumped over the boardwalk railing, waded out into the lagoon, stuck his hand in the muck, and pulled out a Nokia cellphone. A little more fishing yielded my now-turtley-smelling glasses and a big kiss for Keith, along with a few minor cuts and scrapes he got in the process.

I have it on good authority that when Keith and his brother Eric were boys/teenagers, they played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons with their friends. Last month, a new version of D&D was released, so Keith was dying to introduce Joe and Ben to this new version and one of his favorite childhood pastimes. As Dungeon Master, Keith created a short adventure for them--and their intrepid Aunt Rita--to embark on. They were able to create and name their characters and then kill a bunch of really bad monsters, which should give them something to talk about for a while to come.

We very much enjoyed last weekend, even if we did need a week to recover from the pure exhaustion of it all.