Today we played hooky.

The night before I had been up and resigned to be up and then for some unidentified reason I forced myself to find the pajamas I hadn't thrown away, put them on, brush my teeth and lay down in my bed. Nothing was on and it was still loud in my head, but I resisted the urge to get up and check email or work. I must have fell into a deep sleep because I woke up having had clear dreams and a unusually restful sleep.

Initially, I thought we are staying home and doing nothing, but our school work. Then at some point within a 'where the heck did you all put all the paint brushes you kids were using for Harry Potter wands' rant which was going to degrade any moment into a 'you know, Hope, you are doing a lousy job teaching your children responsibility' mindfuck, I thought: you could pick what and how you are going to do today.

We played hooky.

We went to a Girl Scout party where I let the children play with fire and eat too many s'mores, hotdogs and frito pies, while I wrote letters and generally screwed around without being particularly social or trying to organize anything.

After, I took my offspring to PT where they had their butts run off for an hour and half while I talked to a good friend uninterrupted and then topped off it all off with a trip out to the Boardwalk with more kind friends who had free passes for all the rides and dinner.

The kids tested most physical laws including gravity and centrifugal force and of course we took pictures of the shrieks, howls and squeals of glee and watched them goad each other into one ride or the other.

Incidentally, the halter systems the park uses to keep kiddos in their seats on some rides were surprisingly inspiring and soon to be adapted here at home, beta tested, turned into a cottage industry, sold to a Fortune 500 company where some childwatch nonprofit will demand their removal, questioning my ability to mother in light of the device and it's obvious cruelty, whereby I'll go on CCN to defend them and demand to know which one of their fuckers picked such unflattering photographs for the magazine expose and finally lose all the profits to defense attorneys. Yep-- I should definitely get right on that.

Anyway, we spent time with good friends, froze our asses off as the day came to an end and the water was beautiful as usual.

Seems like every time I am out on the Bay or the Gulf it calls to mind the general world and the shores all that water will touch, eventually.

When we got into the car to drive home, the sun cast rose and cerulian chiffon dresses on the undersides of the cirrus clouds lazing across the horizon. I thought about my friends on the other side of the world and wondered what kind of day they had had while I slept the night before and what kind of day they were going to have as the sun disappeared behind the horizon on it's way back to them.