Instincts

The moment the pit bull ran over our towels and through our clothes I should of known this was just the beginning of a bad beach experience. After the third 'run through' I asked the owner, ever so politely in a make-no-mistake tone, could she please restrain her dog. Again, I should of known what the response would be, considering she had hot purple string bikinis and a full body tan. I think dog etiquitte was not high on her priority list.

This was followed by the two spoilt malteses who were being hand fed McDonalds by their owners. What is it abut Maltese owners??? (I think the dogs and their owners comparisons will be for another blog entry). One of these 'toilet brushes' trotted over to my camera bag, cocked its leg and promptly sprayed on it. An "ooopps, sorry" by the owners added to the fury.

Bellowed at the kids and husband and we all loaded ourselves up with the beach goods and stomped 50m further down the beach, me mumbling profanities about irresponsible dog owners the entire way.

The kids had a lesson from Tony on their new skim boards (and Tony's father's day present), and once again I proceeded to lecture Jillian that the skim board can't go in the waves, blah blah blah, it is too heavy, blah blah, blah, you'll hurt yourself blah, blah blah. Can you see where this is heading?


I resisted the urge to say "I told you so" to a 6 year old, feeling that my sarcasm would be wasted and highly inappropriate. This coupled with the guilt that I should be more empathetic to the blood gushing out of my daughter's lip became the 'third' thing of the day. My initial thought flashed to some Animal Planet documentary on sharks and how they can smell a drop of blood in so many million litres of water.




Tony, in all his surfing injury expertise pulled out the vasoline, blobbed it on the gash and sent me for a 'relaxing' walk. Are you kidding me?????? (The cut does look quite small above, let's just say, it's not!)


The mere mention of the word 'stitches', bought on another fresh round of hysterics, can't say I blame her really, so we drove to 8 different chemists looking for bandaid glue. Apparently, they "don't make it any more, but the spray adhesive is just as good". So I bought the spray, because spraying bandaid adhesive on my child's mouth is more appealing than sitting in a public hospital waiting room on the weekend.


Moral of the story? Trust your gut.

Hope you all had a lovely father's day.

Briohny