Tubing with Parents

This weekend, both sets of parents were in town. My favorite part of the trip was whenever a decision had to be made.

"What do you want to do today?"
"What would you like to eat for lunch?"
"Would you like me to poke out your eyeballs with a hot poker?"

No matter what the question, the answer was the same. "We don't care!!!!"

I am fortunate to have compliant relatives. My husband and I are mentally deficient in a number of a key areas, but we are smart enough to always take our parents at their word.

That's how we ended up at the river.

I had been to the river once before. Last summer, a cashier at Wal-Mart told me about a place inside a local state park where you can float downstream in rented inner tubes.

"I can already tell this is a terrible idea," my husband said optimistically as he pulled into the parking lot. A woman walked past our car, holding an infant dressed in head-to-toe hunting camo.

"It's fine," I hissed. "What's the problem?"

My husband complained that everyone at the river was staring at us.

In the end, all my husband's worrying proved to be unwarranted. Tubing is super fun. On our journey down the river, we passed by a raccoon, defecating into the water. My sons managed to tip themselves over twice. The natural lazy river ended in a makeshift pool, which was filled with people who were either wearing bathing suits that they outgrew several years earlier or no bathing suits at all.

"Nice," my husband said to me, as if I had planned things to turn out that way.

When we got back to our stuff, we found that someone had stolen my sons' football and rifled through our cooler. I left the crime scene and took my toddler to the bathroom. Unfortunately, the door was locked. Several minutes later, a couple emerged, holding hands.

"It's time to go," I announced. "Now." My boys cried the whole way home about their stolen football. My daughter complained that the river water made her skin itchy. My dad was very, very quiet. Tim's parents talked incessantly about the raccoon. My husband didn't speak to me for the rest of the day.

The good news was that I was officially stripped of all of my decision making power for the rest of the visit.