The Snakes Are Following Us

Today is the first official day of summer vacation.

It is also the first official day of basketball camp for S2. He has never really played basketball before...well, until he was asked if he might want to go to basketball camp. So we were all up at 6:30, him super excited for camp that started at nine and me making the french press a bit stronger than normal.

His smile when I dropped him off was so worth it.

Basketball camp ended at noon today, the rest of the week it is in the afternoon. Today is also the warmest day of the week, cooler than it's been for the past bunch of days but the warmest for the next seven so we headed to the beach.

When beginning to load the suburban, I walked out of the kitchen door to see a SNAKE...the little snake that had escaped the day before. Not one eyed scar face snake, he hasn't shown up yet, but little fast moving snake. Either way, I screamed. And it got away. And I packed with great caution after that.

We went to the local beach right around the corner from our house. It's great because it's not deep at all, it's not so great when I compare it to my most favorite beach. But it's the beach. And it's the first day of summer. And it was also the first day we brought Jr to the beach and we wanted to see how that would all go.

It went great.

Well, except the snake incident.

The boys were all out in the water and suddenly they begin screaming "SNAKE! SNAKE! SNAKE!" And sure enough, you could see it's head sticking up and the water moving as it swam thru the swim area. The populated beach stared at my boys as though it was rude of them to pull such a mean stunt. But the boys kept screaming, and now they were following the snake "SNAKE! SNAKE! SNAKE!"

And suddenly, as if I were watching a scene from Jaws, the water population began to realize that there really was a snake. Headed amongst them all. The first group to run shrieking out were some high school girls in bikinis that were too little for them. They didn't know if they should grab their tops to run or just run and forget how they looked.

I admit, I giggled.

A man caught the snake and carried it farther down the lake, and the boys, winded, headed back to our "post" on the sandy beach.

"Geesh!" S1 muttered. "You'd think they'd listen to some boys who know something about snakes!"

I'm sure they will next time, son. I just hope there isn't a "snake time" again at the beach, or yard, or field......