From Boat Babies to Landlubber Kids

Our girls have grown accustomed to our vagabondish lifestyle and are extremely laid back with the way things just flow. Often on a whim, one conversation or decision may seamlessly take our lives in an entirely new direction than we had predicted. The last switch that we have made is a pretty major one. We have gone from living on a sailboat and pretty much doing what we want when we want, which is mostly how we have been living our lives the last four years, to living in our HOMETEL where our lives will be a little more structured. There is still a great deal of flexibility in how we will be doing things, but in essence we will be living on land for at least the next six months, and that is a first for our girls. There is excitement in the air with this decision and the new beginnings it is bringing for us. And as we transition from one way of living to the next I am getting a real kick in seeing how the girls are adapting to becoming first time landlubbers.
There are a few things in particular that I have noticed that our girls do, that are clearly because they were raised as boat babies.

They fight over who gets to flush the toilet. Yes flushing a toilet is a hot commodity to them since on the boat we have manual hand pump toilets that they could not handle, where as here with the push of a finger their potty business gets wooshed away to a mysterious place. The other day, Arias, being a “nice” big sister even “let” Ellia flush the toilet for her, as a gift. She was so proud of herself for giving this “gift” to her baby sister.
Taking a bath, in an actual tub, is a looked forward to and planned out event. No longer are the days of quick showers in luke warm water. We are not as hell bent on water conservation, as we don’t have to haul it to our boat. They get to sit in a full size tub, with a bunch of toys, and splash around and play for half an hour each evening. For them it is way more about the playtime than the actual bathing. Early in the morning they will start planning their tub time for that evening, including when they get to take it and what toys will be joining them on this fine evening.
They get EXTREMELY upset, especially Arias, when the TV switches shows on them, when it is actually just the commercials playing. No matter how many times I have explained it to Arias she does not seem to understand that I have no control over the TV, that I cannot pause the show or play any specific movie. I feel grateful that she thinks her Mama has unconditional power over all things, but TV broadcasting is not one of them. When commercials start sometimes the full waterworks start because their show abruptly ended but what she doesn’t grasp is that it will return in only a few minutes. We are still working on that one.
Ellia seems to have way too much fun switching lights on and off. She has found a way up on her bed where she can reach the light switch, and now, quite often when we send her into her room to play with her toys, all we hear in the room is “click, click, click, click”.
This last quirk is quite particular to our present scenerio, given that we are living in a Dominican all-inclusive (think less like Punta Cana and more simply like a hotel with food and drinks included). Out of her vast vocabulary that she has amassed, Ellia’s new favorite words, which we now hear over a dozen times a day are “banana mama” and “buffet”. The first is a strawberry and banana drink, made non-alcoholic for the girls, that are offered at the bar, and the second is quite obviously simply a buffet, a non stop array of food. We have created a monster in this little one who now looks forward to having a huge selection of food at every meal and knows exactly what she wants when she walks up to a bar. People giggle when she can walk up to the bar and order her own drink, I myself find it a little frightening!

With all the new experiences our babies will be facing over the next few months, like going to school, making friends their own age, living in a stationary spot for a longer period, etc, I am sure that there will be many more of these little quirks as our babies become accustomed to life on land.