July 2-5, 2013

I'm going to remember the days surrounding the Fourth of July last year, which I spent in California with my brother's family.

July 2. I got up and got dressed in my red shorts and blue shirt with a red "76" on it. We were going to Six Flags that day. We had a fifteen-year-old girl with a weird name with us, and I think another young women's leader and another young woman came. Once we were at Six Flags, I think we went on a couple of rides, and I followed the young women's leader and the two young women to a ride that wasn't for the kids. The leader asked me how old I was, probably because I was so awkward and quiet. I asked the teenage girl I was sitting by on the ride if she had been to Six Flags; she told me she grew up in a family that usually went to Disneyland. After the ride, my head hurt, and I didn't feel up to more rides. I met up with my family, and I ended up taking Baby (when he still let us call him that) into a play area, but I would have preferred to sit down. We saw the walruses out playing. Franklin said some R-rated things about one of the walruses, and later the walruses engaged in some adult behavior, and Preston said he thought they were married. Then we went to go to one of the shows, all while I didn't feel very well. I thought the show was too circusy and not dolphiny enough. We went to a gift shop to get things for the boys. I really wanted a walrus shirt, but they didn't have any in my size, even when I asked. My mom told the boys they could get something not at Six Flags if they wanted, which I kind of thought defeated the purpose. Baby wanted some green candy, but we tried to talk him out of it. We were leaving, but Baby didn't want to leave. So David stayed with him while the rest of us walked out to wait for the shuttle. I really did not feel well at this point; my head hurt, and I was really impatient for the shuttle to come. Baby decided he didn't want to stay after all, so they came and joined us. I got on the shuttle and had to rest my head. When we got to the parking lot, my dad accompanied me to our car so I wouldn't faint and because my mom was worried about me. I got a Gatorade and some patriotic Goldfish from the back and took them up in the seat. Then we went to lunch at Taco Bell, which Preston wasn't happy about. My mom told me I should get some sugar, and I reminded her of the time on October 13 when I had felt faint and got a pumpkin empanada at Taco Time and she had told me it wasn't good to have sugar when I felt like that, and then she told me she had been wrong on that occasion. I got a slushy drink with my food. Then we drove over to Toys R Us, where my mom was going to buy the promised toys instead of the Six Flags toys. I stayed in the car and slept, and I think it was really windy. Preston came out a little early, and he wanted to pee in a bottle, and Ya-ping reluctantly agreed. But when David came out, he rightfully reprimanded Preston for wanting to do that and told him he couldn't. They had bought a Perry the Platypus karaoke machine and some toys inspired by garbage. Then we went back to David's house, where David set up the karaoke toy for the boys to play with. They liked playing with it, but it sometimes caused some arguments between Franklin and Baby, and my mom said if they couldn't play nice we'd have to put it up. Later, I found Bewitched on, so I watched it. Preston seemed to like it, and laughed at the moving chair. Then the inferior I Dream of Jeannie came on; in this episode, Tony told Jeannie to get all the women's clothes out of the room, and in so doing she accidentally took the clothes off of the women in the room, exposing their slips. David asked if that was appropriate for his kids to be watching, and I said it was better than the movie Brave, and my mom agreed that it wasn't sexual and they were only in their slips. David tried to defend Brave as more appropriate, but it was obvious he was just trying to be right, because his argument had no substance.

July 3. I was awake, but I felt sick, so I didn't want to get up. I heard Preston saying he wanted to watch "the witch show," but they told him it wasn't on. Then I heard the boys playing the Beatles karaoke David had found. David went to work and Ya-ping and my mom went to the store. My dad was on his computer, and I could hear Baby and Franklin arguing over the karaoke machine. Remembering what my mom had said to them about playing nice, I went out and took it away from them and put it up. Ever-happy Baby was fine with that, but Franklin was mad and started hitting me. Preston was on the couch chuckling, and Franklin went over and screamed and started hitting Preston. I pulled him away and told him he needed to go to his room, and he said defiantly, "No!" I didn't enforce it, but he seemed to get better, although he still had some screaming fits during the day. Ya-ping and my mom came back, and Ya-ping set up a table for us to eat sandwiches. She had a thing that cut sandwiches into heart shapes, and Franklin refused to eat such a sandwich because he associated the heart shape with "a woman." That night, David took Franklin and Preston (maybe Baby too) in the car to go find some fireworks to watch. David talked about memories of our grandparents, memories I was too young to remember. Somehow the topic got turned to Twilight, which I have never read or seen, and I remarked how when I was in high school, I heard good things about it, but now everyone makes fun of it. Then David said that's because I'm not surrounded by teenage girls anymore. Then he said that teenage girls also like Justin Bieber (and I also said One Direction). Preston asked if Justin has so many girls in love with him, why isn't he married? David explained that he's still destroying his life. (This was before some of his more recent legal trouble.)

July 4. In the morning, we were figuring out what we wanted to do. David left with the boys to go to some park, basically without consulting us. When he returned, he said that that park's festivities weren't that good. I was so amused by the bags my nephews got that I had to take a picture with my mom's phone to load it to Facebook.

I got on my dad's little computer to do my scripture study and look at my Facebook. Sarena posted about Thurl Bailey singing to her; I "liked" her post, hoping she would know I wasn't mad at her, despite some pretty harsh words I had made relative to a comment she had made on my status a few weeks earlier. We had bought a charcoal grill for David, but we didn't really know how to use it. It took a really long time to cook, and all it did was smoke, so we ended up with smoky chicken. I was in the backyard with Baby, and he was shyly handing me the gray rocks from their backyard. At some point David was chanting "USA" because of my t-shirt. Later we went to Baby's school to play on the playground there. Franklin was better at climbing on the climbing wall than Preston was. We also brought a kite, but we didn't seem to have much success with that.

Later, we went near the bay to watch fireworks. When we got in the car, Baby was really sad about something, but we couldn't understand it. Then he started crying, which made him even harder to understand. It turned out he was sad no one was sitting by him in the backseat of the Suburban. I had to bring my water bottle with me because my throat hurt really bad. It was a very uncomfortable Fourth of July, and I was sad that I didn't get the familiar smoke smell and booming sounds of the fireworks, because they were all far away. It was kind of cool, however, to see multiple shows at once. Then we went home, and I think my mom and Ya-ping went to a store, and my mom got me some lime cucumber Gatorade, since my throat was so sore.

July 5. I think I had taken a popsicle out of the freezer, and Franklin saw me with it, and said, "Why do you get one every day?" But in fact he had eaten more sugar than I had that day. Later David saw my Gatorade and said, "Lime cucumber?" I said I loved it. At one point, Franklin saw my Gatorade and said, "I want a big Gatorade," since the ones we had brought were little ones. But I told him it was the only one there was. I think I went to Costco with my parents to get things for our drive back home. I packed up all my stuff to go home so we could leave in the morning.