Our days are weird. At home, we don’t have big swingy days. Here, every few hours we swing between terrible and wonderful. Or rather, our daughter swings between the two and we swing along behind her.

After she slept in the morning, we sat and played and went out to the beach, which is about 20m away from our balcony, or about 40m away from our front door. Miranda and I sat on the sand and sat with Ava while she looked around. Miranda stood in the water, then I stood in the water, then Ava and I stood in the water. Our goal is slow progression towards actually having her in the water. Perhaps we’re being to cautious, but the nice thing about having so much time here is that we can afford to be cautious in a way that 2 weeks might not allow.

Her second nap she screamed whenever we left her alone. It’s a scream of fear, and it wrenches at your insides and makes you need to make the terror go away however you can. I had planned to go grocery shopping after she went down, and mid-way through the process Miranda said I should go now. I was thankful, and guilty. Apparently she slept after 30 minutes of that, a small blessing.

I went to the local grocery store and bought a bunch of staple foods for making dinner. We’d stopped at Walmart on our way into town, but needed a bit more. Then I stopped at Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck to bring lunch home.

Giovanni’s is an institution in the area. Shrimp trucks are BIG business, this isn’t some sleepy little indy restaurant trying to make it work, there are stories about terrible politics between the trucks. And I’m sure that the other trucks are just as good, since it’s literally just rice, garlic and shrimp assembled in a pleasing manner, but we just keep going to Giovanni’s because it was our first. I skipped the garlic — I plan on eating it at some point, but didn’t feel like blowing a gasket.

Standing in line, there’s about 20 people in front of people at 11am when they open. I’m checking Facebook and my news feed like I have all the time in the world. I finish my feed and look up and see a sign of cold dread CASH ONLY. I have no cash. Here’s a photo of the line behind me. If I go out for garlic shrimp and come back empty-handed while she dealt with an angry baby, Miranda would be pissed!!

This is a good time to mention that if the photo looks terrible, it’s because it was taken with my phone. My camera screen is cracked and has dust in it.

I quickly google’d an ATM, found one, asked the people behind me if they could save my spot (although if they were gone by the time I got back, obviously I would lose it) and took off sprinting. I was gone less than 10 minutes and when I got back, those people were 1 spot from the front of the line. We laughed, I breathed and ordered. ,

I got home, we ate and commiserated about putting Ava to sleep. She woke up, and we went back to the water and I went snorkeling while the two of them sat on the beach and played in Ava’s new beach tent.

The snorkeling in this area is better than I remember it. Lots of scattered little fish, which was nice. But not much in the way of interesting rocks or formations or plant life.

We went in, and I put Ava to sleep and she went right to bed. I asked Miranda why she had such a hard time, and she politely, and with a smile, requested that I come closer to her. I declined, it was a trap.

After she woke, we took a drive into Hale’iwa for Miranda. Retail therapy does solve a lot of problems. We bought shave ice with ice cream and condensed milk! Ava made friends throughout the town. I had her on my back and people kept saying “Oh, there’s a baby!” We avoided buying anything except the ice…until we got to the childrens store.

I have a theory, and it will make sense  those of you with expensive hobbies. Warhammer, for example. It’s easy for me to stop buying Warhammer, because it’s hard to justify some days – I won’t use that model even though it’s cool, I’ve got other things to paint, I don’t play that game, etc. For babies though, she’s like this really expensive hobby that you can always say “this is adorable! we’ll totally use it!” We spent a lot of money in that store. I bought 2 books, one of them has new Hawaii-based words to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which is my favourite lullaby on Ava’s behalf.

At home, it was time for her bed. Miranda had a theory that I would be able to put her to bed easier – I had put her down for both easy naps. Unfortunately, it was not to be and I had a 40 minutes ordeal of putting her down. It wasn’t as screamy as earlier in the day, but she wasn’t sleeping and I had more work to do than usual.

We finished off the day with some computer and Survivor time, and off to sleep.