Genie's day of grumpiness

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

It was cloudy in the morning, and I had had a really restless night, so I was quite tired. Going to breakfast, we ran into Sunny (her real name is Elizabeth) and her parents, and Sunny insisted on having breakfast with Torsten (although she kept calling him Jason until her dad made her repeat “Torsten” about 12 times), so we got a table for 6 and had breakfast together. She just kept talking all through breakfast, wanting to go to the big pool, and wanting Torsten to go with her. We told her that it was really up to Torsten, so she kept trying to persuade him, saying, “You want to go to the big pool, right Torsten? We’ll go to the big pool?”, to which Torsten would just look at her and say, “Little sandbox”. After about 10 minutes of this, she went back to her mom and asked if she could go to the little sandbox with Torsten after breakfast. It was really funny.

After breakfast, Sunny and her mom went back to their room, while we went off to the little sandbox. The fountains were quite high again, and Ingo showed Torsten how to put his hand over one of the returns and make them go even higher. After a while, Torsten got a little bored, as the toys weren’t out for some reason (he loves to play with the little plastic trucks), so I asked the cleaning person where they were (in Spanish – I was very proud of that). She brought out the big tub of toys, and Torsten immediately collected all of the trucks. He then proceeded to give them all an undercarriage wash – he figured out that driving them over one of the fountains would make that fountain stop leaping up, and he thought that was tremendous fun.

Some urgent work came in for me, so I went back to the room to do it. Ingo and Torsten stayed at the Kids’ Club a little while longer, then walked along the beach and played shuffleboard. They also found a little shell which Ingo picked up for a souvenir. Then they came back to the room to pick me up for lunch. By that time, I was really tired and quite grumpy, and so was Torsten, so lunchtime wasn’t particularly lively. Glenn was worried about his certificates – if you win events here, you get a certificate, and if you get 5 certificates, you can get an entry into a raffle to win a trip back to the resort. Glenn had won quite a number of events (he’s good at archery and shooting, and they have that every day), but for some reason had failed to pick up his certificates. He hurried off after lunch to try to get them, as you need to redeem them for the raffle, which happens every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and you must be present at the raffle to win the prize. Since he’d be on another excursion on Wednesday, he was concerned that he wouldn’t be able to get his certificates in time – and we wouldn’t be here on Friday for him to try to win then. We, of course, laughed at him for not figuring this out sooner.

On the way back to the room from lunch, Torsten fell asleep while being carried by Ingo. We were very pleased about this, since we thought it would mean a good nap, and I also intended to take a nap to catch up on sleep. Unfortunately, 15 minutes into the nap, he pooped and woke himself up – and was then very upset about having to be changed. It took us a while to change him, and after that, even though I lay down with him to have a nap, he just wouldn’t sleep. In the end, he never finished his nap, and Ingo took him off so that I could try to take a nap.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get back to sleep at all. I got up, watched some mindless TV, and then tried sleeping on the couch. That didn’t work, so I got out the laptop and did some work, as quite a lot of it had come in that day. Meanwhile, Ingo and Torsten went down to the little splash pool, where he played a bit on his own, then went down to the Kids’ Club, where other children were playing, including Erin. They played together in the plastic play structure, going down the slide and playing with a plastic wheel. Then they played with some of the little chairs that were available for kids to sit in, carrying them around. Torsten, of course, played with the toy trucks, and then saw someone closing up a dolls house, so he went to investigate. He looked in through the doors, put a fork and knife in one door and pulled it out the other side, and generally had a good time checking it out. Eventually, he and Ingo decided to go to the “big sandbox” (ie. the beach) and walked down to the little marina, where he climbed on some of the boats. On their way back across the beach, they saw a big sandcastle that someone had built, but it was a bit too close to the ocean for Torsten’s comfort. They looked at it from a distance for a while, then chased another little boy (Daniel) and started heading back to the room. Along the way, Torsten decided that he wanted a dip in the big pool, so Ingo obliged him – he walked along a submerged ledge for a while. Finally, they made it back to the room, just as I was finishing my last bit of work.

After a lot of struggling to get Torsten into dry clothes, we went off to dinner (I was still grumpy). Magically, some of that grumpiness disappeared once I got some food into me. I had thought that I was just cranky from fatigue, but it looks like I was also hungry! Glenn was still worried about his certificates, as he had only managed to get 2 out of the 7 or 9 that he was owed; it turned out that only 2 people had the key to the safe where the certificates were kept, and he wasn’t even sure whether they had retained his old ones. He went off again after dinner to see what he could do about it, while we went back to our room and did our usual TV watching before going to bed. This time, everyone got a good night’s sleep.