PARROTHEADS IN TRAINING

Jamie Reeves is a Southern soccer mom to two little girls. A professional writer and editor, she works for a small business publishing and her former beach bartender turned business entrepreneur husband owns a growing tech services company. After the birth of their second daughter in March 2005, Jamie started writing about the messier side of motherhood at www.BlondeMomBlog.com. She struggles to get to work, or anywhere for that matter, on time and find 5 minutes of solitude that doesn't involve a toilet.  Jamie has graciously written a fabulous article for Tastybaby that surely please anyone searching for that lost shaker of salt...

Since I was a pre-teen, I’ve traveled with my dad and stepmother from Nashville down I-65 through Alabama and into the Florida Panhandle, less eloquently nicknamed the Redneck Riviera. The landscape changes as you cross the Florida state line, and when you’re within a few miles of the ocean, you can smell the salt-infused air as soon as you crack the car windows.
 Now my husband and I and our two young daughters make the annual trip to the familiar white beaches with the breathtakingly blue and green water. Times have changed since the 1980s, though, and we have more road trip survival gear. Call us modern day survivalists, or simply wimps, but we can’t survive close quarters with two chatterbox little girls without a portable DVD player and enough Disney movies to host a small backseat film festival.

This past May marked the third time we’ve traveled with both our daughters, ages 6 and 3. We stayed at my stepmother’s cheerful flamingo pink stucco condo situated on a little inlet. The area we stay in, Navarre Beach, has no hip night clubs, no fast food joints, no cheesie tropical-on-steroids miniature golf  courses, and that’s just the way we like it. We love nothing more but to sleep in, enjoy the beach and the pool, find the perfect cheeseburger in paradise, and wear nothing more glamorous than a new pair of flip flops all week.

There are a few great local restaurants on the island, and for our last dinner at the beach we headed to one of our favorite beachside eateries. The place was rockin’, literally, and the bar was packed. Our girls were enthralled with a local musician performing in the corner. He started to imitate Barney and sing Twinkle Little Star when the girls made their entrance, but they’re more likely to crank Hannah Montana than Mother Goose, and they wrinkled their noses.

Our 3-year-old, Amelia, started chanting “Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Buffett” when he asked for requests. He began the familiar strains of that Parrothead anthem, Margaritaville, and the girls danced and twirled in their sundresses. Amelia, channeling her inner backup singer, ran up to the singer and he crouched down with the microphone so the could sing along. Big sister Caitlin held back, and held my hand, and before I knew it she was dancing and singing alongside me. As the singer ended his song, the bar erupted into laughter and applause and our server led all four of us, sunburned, but happy, to our corner table beneath a thatched patio umbrella. It was the perfect ending to a perfect family vacation.