getting out in the world around me

Sometimes i tend to get a little isolated here. Tucker requires a lot of care and attention - which i lovingly do as his mother. it is my life and there is no 2 ways around it. and it isn't so much the constant care that wears me down, but the grief of what happened to him and us. at times it can be crippling. sometimes my husband and i like to compare our lives to the movie "Ground hog day" where the same day happens over and over again. honestly though, the only time i really feel stressed with my role as a caregiver is when tucker isn't feeling well and that is simply because i fear for him. i wonder will this be the illness that takes him from me? things like that. it's hard. So what do i do? i create. i make things and drown out my sadness with art. my husband, who i love dearly, finds other non -healthy ways to cope. this also isolates me from him. but it is what it is. we all cope differently.

so that being said, i made myself get out of the house today. dillon is in the Poconos with his girlfriend and family, tucker had caregiver help for most of the day and tonight and my husband was over at his mom's house working on some projects for her. so i decided i would pretend that i was on vacation. i would eat what i wanted, do what i wanted and pretend that i had not a care in the world. I made a wonderful lunch of hummus, cucumbers, red onions and pita bread. i finished another page in my "gatherings" book, i went to ACMoore to get some craft plywood to make a gift, then i took a nap. in the early evening i went to see the progress on the backyard projects at my MIL, Janet's, house. after chatting with Janet for awhile, i left and headed over to Manasquan beach, in particular, the dog beach. the dog beach is the only place i know of locally to find sea glass. there is no drift wood to be found and i don't know why. how come driftwood doesn't drift onto the beaches around here? weird. alas, upon arrival at the dog beach, it is high tide. there will not be much glass to be found today as it tends to get buried under all the rocks. low tide is the best time to find it. we find a lot of blue sea glass here, which is rare. even rarer is when we find red pieces. when dillon was younger, we use to hunt for blue pieces telling ourselves we could not leave until we found one more blue piece each. it always worked.

i decided to walk the beach anyway. it is fun to watch all the doggies get excited to chase balls into the water, run after each other; barking and getting sandy. i always walk to the way back where there is a bend and it gets quite marshy. i like to think of this as my secret place. it can be kind of gritty, so most people don't go back there. guess they think it is gross. but i love to go there because you can see the most fabulous birds. and i wasn't disappointed. i got to see 3 egrets, 2 black crown night heron, a darling sandpiper, some purple martins, a momma duck and her ducklings and some funky bird that i don't know the name of. this little bird kept hovering over the marsh pools. he'd wait and wait as he flapped his wings and then dive into the water for whatever it was he saw. he made a huge splash for such a little bird. i'll try to identify him later in my NJ shore bird book.

after awhile i figured i'd better start my way back. i decided to take some photos of things that had been left behind on the beach (besides garbage!) so here are some of the things i found that had been forgotten:

tomorrow morning i plan on getting up and heading over to the Manasquan Reservoir to take more pictures over there. it is a really beautiful area and i haven't been over there in years. tonight for dinner i plan on having a bowl of lucky charms or trix. now how's that for a vacation?