Merrily, Merrily, Merrily...A.K.A Dear Jesus, Please Don't Let Me Die In An Innertube

Welll...this weekend was LOADS O' FUN.  Yours truly was out in nature, enjoying all of it's splendor and being carelessly rammed into huge boulders in the name of FAMILY TIME.

Honestly, the fault was mine.  Last Thursday I was reading a blog about how few summers I have left with my son and I got all mushy and all I can say is...I claim insanity.

I hopped on the web with determination that we were going to have a GREAT TIME this weekend, and in the words of Clark Griswold...we were gonna have the hap-hap-happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap danced with Danny Kaye.

(If you don't know that movie, I'll say a prayer for you tonight.  Because you are clearly in need of a cinematic education my friend.)

In the midst of the hopping and surfing and all, I came across an advertisement for a company that will allow you to get into a plastic inflated circle of death and roll on down the river.  Yes we could have all ended up as quadraplegics, but hey, it only cost 9 bucks each and if nothing else, we are all about life-threatening injuries for cheap.

Actually, what was on the forefront of my mind, and imminently more frightening (you know, more than my son's well-being and the possibility of his life being cut short) was how I was going to look getting into the stupid tube.  Because y'all...Mimi has put on a leetle poundage since her hey-day as a young and happening hipster.

Yes indeed.

And since the sun hates me, I get the added bonus of having the skin pallor of the undead.

So we rolled into the parking lot and a really bored (and tan) college guy comes out and shoves some paperwork at me that basically says, "BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...you can't sue us even if we're negligent...BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...neither can your kids, or your friends or your friends' kids...sign here and good luck not dying, and if you lose our tube, you owe us twenty bucks."

The concern for the safety and well-being of their customers just rolled off the pages.

We go to the change rooms where I tried not to think about germs and MRSA and whatnot and I squeezed into my bathing suit.  I had a nice breezy black cover-up that didn't quite cover-up what I wanted to cover-up...so for my family's added enjoyment, I put on a pair of blue striped polyester cropped pants.

Quite the fashion plate I am.

We got our tubes and got on the shuttle which drove us to the drop-off point. In what I would term as a minor miracle, I managed to successfully get on my tube with the first try.  I paddled out to the middle of the stream where my husband and son were waiting floating away and tried to follow the rules that our shuttle driver imparted to us, which were a)don't die and b)don't go down the river backwards. 

Oh well, why didn't I think of that?

So naturally out of all the floats that were available I got the broken one, because no matter how hard I tried...I floated backwards.  And it appears that the Holy Spirit may have been trying to tell me something because my float went straight for the biggest boulders in the river.  Every. Time.

My husband tried shouting helpful things to me like, "Don't try to control it!  Just go with it!"

Oh really?  Hi, do you know me?  Your wife of twenty-one years?  Helicopter mom?

Eventually though...his words got through to me.  And there was actually a second where I let myself float and didn't try to steer anything.  And for that one moment I found that it was easier if I just let go and trusted that Jesus was not about to let me die in an innertube.

I'm sure there's a life-lesson in that for me somewhere.

By the time we got to our exit point I had even worked up enough courage to ask the fam if they wanted to go again.  Even though what I really wanted to do was you know...go home.  But they were hungry and were more interested in finding food than tempting God a second time, and honey, when they told me that it was all I could do not to break out in tongues and do the Holy Ghost buck and jive. 

Which I'm sure would have given all the out-of-towners and vacationers who were there with us a lot more sight-seeing than they really wanted.

And everybody said, "Amen."