Friday night
We leave tomorrow. It is about 10:30pm. Levin and Raven plan to swim tomorrow morning at 8am for one last time. Leah & Jean plan to take a morning walk at 5am. I plan to take a morning walk at about 7am. We’ll see how all this works out!
We have had 4 cakes (one tonight for Raven), numerous games of chess, a few games of Monopoly and Yahtzee, I think one game of cards. I am too tired to give an account of the last 2 days. It has been a good family time, but very tense many times. I can’t wait to be home again. We found that we usually spent only a couple hours on the beach per day. Without Naylah it may have been more, but with sunburns and the intense HEAT this summer, about 2 hours was it. We went some days at 5pm and stayed for an hour & ½, when it was pleasantly cooler and less crowded. One day we spent 4 hours there when we took the cooler, sandwiches, and water.
We learned Levin got a call from Barnes & Nobles & also a gas station for a job, today. Hopefully he will manage 2 part-time jobs for awhile and get some of his bills paid off. Learned today from Jamal that Shelly got 2 job offers as well. Some things are working out.
I don’t remember what I’ve written & what I’ve not written. One thing I want for next year is either a bigger place, OR NO TV! I want no tv. It is constant, constant noise, and goes on into hours of the night after most of us are in bed. Yes, there are adults who want to stay up later, but when you think of last year, at the cabin, we did not have tv and we were all much more together and focused, and relaxed. We would hook up movies and watch them ALL together, then talk a little bit, and then all go to bed! We were much more united. This tv is just constant blaring of background noise, and no one mutes the commercials. It is almost too much to bear.
I am going to bed. Caspian needs to crash out at about 10:00, 10:30 at the latest. He is realizing now that he is tired by that time. He goes into mine and Dad’s bed and lays down. We are all so tired.
Went to a music concert tonight on the museum grounds. It was quite nice. People were dancing, even did the electric slide. It was a good Motown-type blues band. They had fun & got the crowd going. Sunset is really nice and peaceful with a big sky out here in ocean-island land. We are off the mainland here.
We took turns doing the “baby dance” – holding Naylah while she is awake and fussy, trying to keep her from fussing. Jean has this step-dance type thing that he does which quiets her down, so we started saying that was his “African dance”. Then everyone started making up their own unique style of rocking and stepping while holding Naylah. Baba does it best though.
Al, Levin, Jean and Raven are watching a fight on tv at the moment, and telling old Halloween stories. It has also been a sports weekend on tv, golf, Tiger Woods, some soccer game, the All-Star baseball game, and now boxing. We go from Sponge Bob to sports, except for 2 nights of “So you think you can dance”.
I have about 150 pics on my camera, about 10 short videos I will put onto CDs for everybody and send them a copy. I want Levin and Raven to get done swimming in the morning and stop worrying about someone getting caught in a riptide and drowning. They experienced it late yesterday, when Caspian, Levin, Jean and Raven all felt it, and had trouble getting back in. It’s something you have to be constantly aware of and prepared for. You have to be constantly alert.
Doctor Grandma 
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