The hazards of living on a boat (Warning: lots of CAPS in this one)...

So boat living, like any type of living, has some ups and downs. And some hazards. I’m going to focus on the 3 that are the most common in our lives right now. One of which mostly has befallen Aden and Greg….who are basically the same person. One is all Aden…all day. And the third has primarily befallen the adults…pushing us to the brink of INSANITY.

Hazard #1 : Hitting your head on stuff

Just today…literally today, Aden has hit her head 4 times which has resulted in a bump and tears. Keeping in mind the numerous other times that she has likely bonked her head but not hard enough to cry therefore not hard enough to warrant my excellent parenting attention. Greg also engages in this behaviour on a daily basis (though when asked right now he responded with a “zero”, which Liam and I both believe is head-injury related amnesia). Aden hits her head mostly while playing near cabinets, walls or door frames. Yes. Door frames. Greg usually hits his head on odd-shaped doorways, bulkheads and more often than you would believe, the top sliding cover for the hatch . His large melon also seems to find the little knobs on the hard dodger for the canvas to attach to…I still don’t understand what position he gets himself in to do this. Then of course, because he is currently doing 90% of all the hard boat work, he bangs his head often as he crawls in or out of a tiny space in which he has been solving one of the MANY FREAKING PROBLEMS WE HAVE ENCOUNTERED (more on this later…Greg will write a post about this after he puts some ice on his head). To be clear for those of you who haven’t met Greg in person, he’s 5’8”…. so there really is no excuse for this. My hypothesis is that he and Aden both share the same “spacey / distracted-with-their-internal-thoughts” gene that predisposes them to such danger. These incidents happen so often It is getting hard to be sympathetic anymore…the struggle is real.

There is a very tiny knobby-screw thingy circled here and it was the very first thing Greg hit his head on the very first time he attempted to go below decks when we first saw this boat. Seriously.

Hazard #2: Dropping stuff in the water

So far this is mostly Aden. Ok it’s all Aden. 100%. To-date this little lady has dropped Muffin in the water, the same flip flop on two different occasions, and one of my flip flops. Ironically the only one that WASN’T saved was mine. Nice. In terms of Muffin, for those of you who don’t use Instagram and didn’t see the story, the highlights are as follows:

Aden carries Beenie Boo “Muffin” out of the boat…she told me after the fact that as she was doing this she was imagining what would happen if she dropped Muffin in the water
Aden drops Muffin in the water and LOSES HER MIND
Greg bravely drops what he had in his hands and dives onto the dock to reach down into the depths to save Muffin
Aden spends the rest of the day apologizing to Muffin and carrying her around in her hat

It was pretty funny. She was not impressed when I giggled about it though. In fact if she knew I was writing this she’d be pretty cheesed off.

Hazard #3: Stepped-on toes

This one is driving me crazy. And Greg crazy. Like have-to-show-restraint-to-not throw-a-kid-overboard-when-it-happens crazy. Every damn time we turn around there is a kid. Now, I know, I know…we live on a boat right? It’s a small space…less than the 48.5’ by 14.6’ that is our LOA and beam respectively. I know I should expect traffic jams. And I do, I have a pretty high tolerance for them. But when they occur because a kid is just plain old NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO WHERE THEIR BODY IS IN SPACE AND TIME it makes me mental. Coupled with the fact that it’s usually accompanied by stepping on our feet it’s down right brain melting. OH? You think I’m being dramatic? I swear Greg and I have had our toes stepped on, and heels of our flip flops stepped on mid-flop, at least 3 times each JUST TODAY. This started day 1 of our adventure so I’d say our toes have each been mashed at least 54 times. It’s getting old. I just lectured them before bed tonight about paying attention to where they are in relation to other people and what’s going on in the boat…we’ll see what happens tomorrow but I don’t have high hopes. It’s not the boat…we had this small-space-dance down pat on EXODUS (our Beneteau First 36.7) and even our J24…much smaller boats. Compared to our previous boat the HR46 is HUGE (or YUGE as they say here in Maryland)…lots of space to NOT STEP ON EACH OTHER.

I think the kids are a little crazy with the whole unstructured summer meets distracted (and stressed) parents meets whole new lifestyle meets later than usual bedtimes meets….other stuff probably. Maybe they are a tiny be insecure right now (understandable) and being as physically close to us as possible at all times no matter how hot, sweaty, frustrated or sleeping (!) we are, brings some comfort to them. Usually they are in camps and at Gma’s house and the summer is mapped out like clockwork with some family cruises as well. Right now it’s basically Greg doing boat jobs all day (he’s constantly muttering a mantra to himself “getting there, we are getting there” to quell the panic) while I try and earn some cash and keep the business going with Liz and then both of us continuing to get boat jobs done at night while fighting off the urge to drink a beer, or sleep or one then immediately after the other. Case in point, while I write this Greg is mapping out the required sqft of carpet we need to DIY some flooring here on Matriarch. Beer is in the background.

Greg doing his engineering-thing with graph paper, pencil and ruler…now aren’t you glad I brought all that graph paper honey?!?! Also, note the beer in the background :P

Perhaps it’s all part of settling into a new space, a new life, a new country for that matter…or perhaps I am doomed to bruised toes and torn (or lost) flip flops, a kid and a husband constantly on the brink of self-concussed and splinters in our chests from lying face down on the dock reaching for another damn Beenie Boo.

Bed time / beer time.

Much love

M