Water Park Outlaw

This past February, I tried out a theme park with my family called Aquatica. To give some back story, when I say family I don’t mean, myself and my husband and one child. When I say family, I want you to picture myself, Joe, my two kids, my brother and his wife, my Dad and step Mom and and then my nephew and four nieces. Now that I have given you the full picture of the characters in this stand off, I think you will be better able to appreciate it. We have tried to do Disney in this family function, but Disney is it’s own machine that can gobble you up whole and write your own divorce papers, and with that many moving parts, it was decided Aquatica would be the perfect setting for a family adventure. I would also like to point out as I write this, that I have the absolute best family a girl could ask for. I love all of them dearly and I have and will continue to get into a verbal brawl with anyone on social media or at Subway who defames their appearance or character. This is my story, I can make fun of us, but you can’t make fun of us. See where I’m going here?

I knew it would be a day, because as we entered into traffic going into the park, all of a sudden my Dad and my brother took sharp rights into the employee parking lot. Ummm . So Joe and I are paying the 30 dollars and blood sample or whatever it cost to park at Aquatica and we are getting texts that read, where are you guys? Well, we are not employees, so we are parking in the general parking lot, haha. My stepmom loves to break the rules upon entry. When you go into Aquatica you can rent a locker for forty dollars, and also go back and forth between water slides and accessing your credit card to pay for meals and the alcoholic drinks that your kids will lean you toward. People, please don’t overextend yourself. All you need to really do is go to the sunglass hut off the right and give all your financial information to an unsuspecting bald man and poof your financials are tied to a semi waterproof bracelet that can be scanned throughout the day, for food, beverages and stuffed animals you don’t need. Problem. Solved. When you put on your bathing suit, make sure you grab the one that is intended for a secure hold and not the one that has been stretched out and bleached out by hot tub glory. You really want everything held in just so for those twists and turns during the waterslide. Please don’t neglect to think about the backside of your bathing suit. What feels cheeky now, can and will be tucked right up your well you know, and if it is already thong like when you start, well then did your Momma raise you right? Completely kidding, this is Merica, if you don’t mind wearing a string bikini with less material than a bandana, good for you, I just want to remind you that those ride attendants don’t have much for entertainment and they will push you just so , so that you hit that last turn real hard and end up smacking the water with your face and your knees and they will send your shame on snap chat.

There are also large pumps of sun screen throughout the park and while this is generous and giving , I have never in my whole life trusted large pumps of anything. I don’t trust that shit for ketchup, hand sanitizer, lotion, or shampoo. I’m working with some sensitive skin and pallet, so I will use my own 20 dollar bottle, thank you very much. If I can’t see the ingredients, I’m going to go ahead and assume it is whale semen WITH PARABENS, and no thank you. I celebrate Earth Day year round. Also first timers, please don’t bring your own life jackets, or swimmies or floaties. They have color coded life vests that are actually pretty comfortable. The color goes with your height and chest size. I thought I was a yellow, turns out I’m a turquoise. Same thing happened in middle school when I went bra shopping. I really try not to beat myself up about it. You don’t have to wear the life vest all day, but I make my kids, because I watch a lot of crime tv and if they are going to be taken, I want them to be safe, as their kidnapper undoubtedly makes them resume doing all the waterslides in the park while they are in captivity.

Now onto the juicy part of the story. I have tried to explain this to several friends at work. I don’t know if I really captured it well, so I’m going to put my best keyboard fingers forward with this one. There is an area of the park where you can just sit in beach chairs and watch your kids in the wave pool. When I say beach chairs, I mean BEACH CHAIRS. Rows and Rows. So at one point My Dad and Deb are at the beach chairs and they have the little crowd with them. The little crowd consists of kids who can’t go on the big water slides, but will scream when the rest of us do. So my Dad and Deb took one for the team and sat with them in the beach chairs and rotated between that and the splash zone, which is basically a sensory overload nightmare that parents will hate but kids will love. This left me with the big kids. I don’t mind being with the big kid group that much, but I don’t like the peer pressure. At one point they wanted to go down this one water slide that shoots you up into outer space, back down a fully enclosed tunnel, through a separate chute where you get to see Hitler, Manson, the Clown from It, and that hairy beaver thing that attacks in the Princess Bride. Oh my goodness, I think I’ll skip this slide you guys, I have some sites I need to check out. My husband looked at me funny, but he loves thrill seeking activities and so he mumbled something about hoping they had enough adults and by that time I was already half way to the drink stand. I feel a little bad, but only a teeny bit admitting this. I mean, I sent the kids on a long waiting water slide and I went by myself to a drink stand, but it was glorious. No regrets right? I had no money, but I had my trusty bracelet, so I ordered the fruitiest, most sugar infested thing on the menu and stood to the right of that drink hut and just had at it. People walked by with their screaming kids, running to the bathroom, smothering them with more sun screen while they pointed frantically about which ride they wanted to do. I stood there in my turquoise life vest, and my sand covered toes and smiled kindly at how sucky their life must be in this moment. Who takes kids to a water park anyways?

At the height of my beverage enjoyment, I decided it was time to rejoin my family and so I headed back to the beach area where My Dad and Deb were with the littles. As I was walking back, I noticed some yelling, which didn’t deter me, it’s not uncommon at any given moment in my family to have some yelling. But then I saw a large, busty woman holding an infant in one of the chairs, my step mom had laid our beach towels over at the start of our venture. Oh shit you guys, it was about to go down. This woman, she didn’t follow the code, the code which begins in pre school and ends at the grave, which is when you put your coat or towel or purse somewhere, that thing is now yours, until such item is removed. Everyone knows it, Columbus knew it , that man on the moon , he knew it, that woman who hit me with her cart on black Friday , she got the memo. But this woman, that day in the water park. She didn’t know it. Now to be clear, I’m not a very confrontational person, I’m more of a lover than a fighter, I am an observer. But this is not true for all of my family. At first my stepmother, gently reminded this woman that the chairs that she and her baby and her six grown family members were occupying , were in fact our chairs. And they had been our chairs since 10 am that morning, because we claimed them right after we increased our bust size with the life jackets and put on the whale semen sun screen. The woman, looking non plussed, began yelling to the rooftops. Would she move? The answer to that was no. Should she move? Also no. Was her husband here? Folks that was a yes. Would he kick our ass? Also a yes. Oh my goodness, all of a sudden the small surge and satisfaction that I had received from that drink hut, was replaced by the sudden fear that we were all about to enter a street/beach fight. The woman continued to rant and rave with one arm, holding her baby with the other, which did make me cringe quite a bit. Then she began to scream “you, stupid, all of you are stupid”. At this point, I was so embarrassed, I just wanted to grab our towels and succumb to the pressure. Yes we are stupid Nadine! Thank you for pointing that out. But we are allowed to burn in peace on vacation. At this point, my stepmom attempted to involved a few pre pubescent life guards, who did nothing but pat their swim trunks and text their moms for advice. It seemed the fight would be up to us. I tried distracting the kids, imploring them to go to the wave pool with me, I would even do that shit show of a water slide if it meant we could look away from the Jerry Springer scene for a second. But they are not stupid, they knew this was good entertainment. At one point, my sister in law noticed that the woman in question had taken our beach toys and allowed her own kids to use them. She kindly asked for them back. The woman became more enraged. She proclaimed she had nothing to do with the fact that her children were holding sand toys that she did not buy. What were we calling her a thief? Did we know how stupid we were? Oh my lanta, I could have melted right there into the sand. Finally after more screaming, sun screen spraying , and verbal sparring. The fight ended. The husband showed up. He in fact looked less like Denzel Washington and more like Kevin Hart. He appeared to be a light hearted gent, with a non confrontational soul and he assisted her in pushing their stroller awkwardly through the sand , with her teenagers in tow, kicking our sand gear as they went. Did I learn a lesson from this adventure my readers? The answer to that is yes. If you sneak off for some self indulgence , for some time completely away from your family on what is intended to be a FAMILY outing, karma will come back to bite you, directly in your sun kissed rear. I have made my bed with it though , because I must say, it was so entertaining to watch and even more entertaining to write.