Poconos in the Rain

Another year, another Memorial Day weekend. And another family trip to the Poconos!

If you’ve been reading here a while, you know by now that it’s tradition for us to travel down to the Poconos Mountains in Pennsylvania to spend a weekend with my family at my mom’s best friend’s house. Our group is getting larger every year, now that all of us kids—my mom’s three and Susan’s two—are grown up, marrying off, and having families of our own. We’ve all known each other basically all of our lives, so it’s a fun time. We look forward to this weekend every year! This is our second year making the trip over Memorial Day weekend.

As usual, we left on Thursday night after work. When I was picking up Nora from daycare, I was carrying her out of the house when I fell off of the front step and landed in a heap on the sidewalk. Well, actually, I stepped down off of the stoop onto an uneven portion of the sidewalk. My foot rolled just the right (well, wrong) way and it gave out. I felt tremendous pain in my left foot and knee as everything was tweaked, and I fell forward with Nora in my arms. I managed to keep her in my arms until I was just a couple of inches from the ground, at which point I let go. Poor thing knocked the back of her little head on the sidewalk and started crying—but truthfully I think she was more scared than hurt. In addition to saying her head hurt, she was crying about the car keys being on the ground (“Daddy’s keys fell! Daddy’s keys!”) two seconds later. The whole thing was clearly very traumatizing for her. :)

Anyway, it was not a great way to kick off a long weekend. What the hell? Why does this stuff always happen when you’re getting ready to leave town? I ultimately opted to let us all hit the road as planned. I didn’t feel like spending time in an urgent care center to get an X-ray. Although it hurt, it didn’t seem to be swelling up like a balloon, and I was able to bear weight on it OK… so off we went. We caravanned down with my family, as we usually do.

At our halfway stop, I was limping pretty good, but I had been icing it in the car—no way to elevate it, though! Again, I was able to get around OK, and it wasn’t looking any worse, so I thought I was just dealing with a sprain.

Nora was good in the car. She just hung out with us and ate her sandwich during the first 45 minutes or so, then we turned on movies for her on the iPad. She watched quietly for the rest of the ride! But after about an hour, we hit rain, and it was POURING the rest of the ride. To drive three hours in that garbage was not fun at all. Michael drove the first half and I drove the second half, and there were times when I couldn’t even really see the road. Stressful!

The rain was indicative of what was to come.

As we were getting closer and closer to the Poconos, my foot started hurting more and more. Despite icing it while I was driving (it was my left foot, so it’s all good!), I could feel it throbbing and any little movement was causing me a lot more pain than before. When we pulled up in Susan’s driveway and got out—in the pouring rain, no less—I was horrified to learn that I could.not.walk. I literally could not even take a single step on my left foot. At that point, I was convinced that I must’ve broken my foot, so I cried. How could my luck be so bad? I just had appendicitis and now a broken foot? All while PREGNANT?

My brother came out and assisted me into the house and Susan greeted me with painkillers and a fresh bag of ice, along with a pile of pillows. Not the way I wanted to start things off! We unloaded everything and got settled. After a little bit of time, we put Nora to bed on her air mattress in our room and then all of us adults caught up for a while longer before calling it a (late) night.

The next morning? I still couldn’t walk. Couldn’t bear weight on my foot. We started to make plans to visit an urgent care center to get it checked out—but it was 40 minutes away so I was not in a huge rush. And the weather, oh man—the HIGH temperature on Friday was 45 degrees. And it rained practically the whole day. It was freezing and it was not conducive to our normal outdoor Poconos activities. Bummer.

While we all lazed around all morning, Susan’s husband arrived. He’s a doctor—a plastic surgeon—so he checked out my foot and assured me he really thought it was just a sprain. He and his daughter ran into town for a few things and he picked me up a good ace bandage, and wrapped my foot for me. In the meantime, as I attempted to get around the house, I began to be able to put more weight on it little by little. I still had a mean limp, but it was seemingly getting better. And once wrapped? I could walk a bit. I decided to hold off on urgent care altogether.

The whole gang decided to head to the (somewhat) nearby outlet mall for some shopping. Although it was better, I couldn’t do THAT much walking, so Michael had to push me around in a wheelchair. Nora rode around in my lap. :) I don’t know why we didn’t get a photo, we so should have! Oh well.

That basically summarizes our first day. We didn’t do much of anything except shopping. Nora and Hunter got outside for all of 10 minutes before it started raining again.

Toddlers and fireworks. Good combo. :) Just kidding—they are just sparklers and smoke “bombs.” And they didn’t even get to light any, at least not on this day! Nora was loving PURPLE and BLUE, though (her favorite colors).

Saturday was not much better. It was still overcast and cold and wet. By afternoon we started getting some breaks of sunshine and we thought that maybe we’d get out for a little walk around the property, but Mom and Susan headed out and basically came running right back in a few minutes later. It was VERY windy, and still freezing. Outdoor time was out of the question—again.

But it was also Hunter’s birthday, so we occupied ourselves with that for a bit. We had thought ahead and brought Hunter’s gift with us so that it would be something else for the kids to play with. We let him open it in the morning.

It was a remote control car, and both Nora and Hunter were infatuated with it. It kept them busy for a great deal of time—score!

It must also be said that Nora was IN LOVE with all of the dogs in attendance for the weekend. In total, we had six dogs running around—my brothers and I each have one, and Susan has three of her own. SIX DOGS! Nora was especially smitten by the poodles, probably because there are two of them and they were “twins.” :)

We found her like this multiple times—up on the couch between the two dogs. This photo is not posed… this is literally how we found her! So cute. I took the opportunity to interview her about her beloved new friends. Video is below:

While they were gone, Nora and I got to work making Hunter a birthday cake. After dinner that night, we all gathered ’round to celebrate the little guy.

Ending the day with cake and good company… how could that be wrong?

Although the first two days weren’t all we had hoped they would be, our expectations for our Poconos vacations are usually pretty low—meaning that we don’t make many plans. It’s supposed to be a carefree weekend, so we roll with the punches. And rain? Well, there’s nothing we could do about it. We made the best of it and relaxed more than we ever get to do at home!

Thankfully, things started looking up on Sunday. More to come.