Ah, Vacation: Lake Monsters, Home Poopers, and The Sunblock of Doom

You can't squish your toes into lake muck and
not assume there's a lake monster in there somewhere.

Ah, vacation.  A change of scenery, a chance to try new things, time to relax.

For most of us, that is.  For Little Dude, it's a little overwhelming. This is a kid who doesn't like surprises, transitions, or changes.  So staying in a different house, in a different town, with different everything is kinda stressful for him.

I have to say he held up like a trooper.  Sure, every night he had a mini-meltdown because he wanted to sleep in his bed at home, but every morning he was ready to eat the exact same breakfast he eats at home.  He even went swimming in a lake, which encompasses enough sensory stimuli to overload an adult, let alone a kid with sensory processing disorder.  Have you ever felt lake muck?  It slides and slurps between your toes and skeeves out grown men.

I need this to come in a
ten-gallon power-
sprayer format.

Then there's our ongoing battle with The Sunblock of Doom.  Sunblock has always been Little Dude's nemesis.  Anything gooey on his skin is Total Trauma Island.  I did find a spray sunblock that freaks him out significantly less, but unfortunately one can of it covers our family of six exactly once, and then it's time for a new can.  We went through a ton of it, but no one cried and no one got sunburned.  (If you're interested, it's Banana Boat Ultramist Ultra Defense, and no one's paying me to say so.) 

Our vacation is over now, but we're still in recovery mode.  I managed not to come home with too much dirty laundry, but the kids are still completely fouled up.  I think the mathematical equation for this is something like this: 

Yeah.  My kids are "home poopers."  We're now onto a bowel-cleansing regime that would normally be reserved for preparing for gastrointestinal surgery. It's amazing how much fiber you can jam into a child's diet if you really try hard enough.  I also took one of my readers' advice that raspberries, while expensive, are Nature's Miralax.  ("I'm paying like $5 a poop.")  By combining Nature's Miralax with actual Miralax, maybe we'll get somewhere before school starts.