El Bosque Plateado

Often the students in my Spanish courses will ask me how to translate the names of places or restaurants. “Profe, ¿cómo se dice ‘Red Robin’ en español?” they call out with innocent and expectant faces. I explain that there are some things we don’t translate, such as names or titles. This, despite the fact that my Peruvian husband thinks it’s the most hilarious joke on Earth to belt out poorly translated song lyrics as we carpool to work or invent literal, nonsensical translations of the stores and businesses we pass. (Full disclosure: I play along too).

Sometimes I tell the students my favorite restaurant is “El Petirrojo” (Red Robin) or that our school is called “El Lago de Pino” (Pine Lake). They are not as amused by my jokes as I am.

Last week, my family and I took our much anticipated annual trip to: El Bosque Plateado (Silverwood). We have now traveled to this theme park in Idaho three summers in a row. As my children are no longer toddlers (7 and 4), and last year was easier than the previous year, I assumed this year’s journey would be a breeze. 

The five-hour drive there is fine. We stop for Mexican food on the way and order the white cream sauce enchilada that Matthias, our seven-year-old, has mentioned a dozen times over the past hour. He ate it three weeks ago on our road trip to Oregon and cited it as being the best enchilada he ever tasted. Since the menu doesn’t feature Enchiladas Suizas, I explain what we are looking for to the waitress, and she kindly makes a special order. 

It arrives hot, delicious and looking exactly like the enchilada from Oregon. Matthias scowls and says he wanted a red sauce enchilada. But he eats it anyway, with the help of Root Beer bribery.

Emilia, our four-year-old, chews a few bites of her chicken quesadilla while hanging upside down from the booth seat.

The kids get to sleep too late that night and wake up indignant over the rays of sun flickering through the hotel curtains. I’ve fallen asleep with them on their pull-out sofa bed without a pillow, and now I can’t turn my neck to the right, but that is the least of my problems as I realize that this will be one of those mornings in which Emmy chooses simply not to do any of the things that are asked of her. This only happens about every other day. 

When it is Emilia’s turn to shower, she refuses to stop watching “Super Kitties” on the iPad and will not even acknowledge that I am speaking to her. After ticking through the menu of trusted, appropriate parenting strategies, I resort to a more high-leverage technique: prying the iPad from the child’s fingers in frustration while delivering a scathing lecture on the importance of getting to the park on time in order to have FUN!

She begins screaming at a decibel so piercing that my smart watch alerts me to the risk of temporary hearing loss (not a joke, unfortunately). The scene prompts my husband, who has recently emerged from the shower, to ask something along the lines of, “Why didn’t you try – before just abruptly turning off the show?” 

I lock myself in the bathroom to take a deep breath (this is a lie–I never remember to breathe when angry), and I vaguely hear hubby echoing the exact same admonishments I had previously, as his frustration mounts. Emmy is in full-blown screaming mode, screeching louder than a wounded hyena. We are one hour behind schedule, with all hopes of grabbing a caffeinated beverage along the way crushed like distant dreams. Matty begins clutching his stomach with what I can only imagine are the sharp, shooting prickles of anxiety. We now all hate each other’s guts.

My mother-in-law, who raised five kids in rural Peru while selling produce and running a restaurant in the market, sits in patient silence across the hotel room. I don’t want to consider what she thinks of our American parenting tactics. 

Eventually, I manage to get everyone out of the room in order to give Emmy what she really needs. I sit with her in a calm embrace for five minutes until the tantrum ceases. She allows me to dress her and even opts to use the restroom. 

By the time we ride the elevator downstairs, Emilia is beaming brighter than the sun that instigated her sour mood this morning. In the lobby, her Mamita combs her thick, tangled mane into two intricate braids while Matthias peers at me in awe. 

“Mommy, how did you convince her?” I am a hero in this moment.

I explain that all she needed was a hug and for someone to show they cared.

Matty’s stomach ache has evaporated, and we head to the car with our giant Costco wagon of kids’ crap. Emmy poses by a pine tree and demands a photo shoot before she will climb into her car seat. I scan through the pictures in the car. Her face is absolutely glowing with joy. She is every nickname her Mamita calls her each day: Gorgeous, Princess, Porcelain Doll, Queen. 

Queen of the frickin’ world.

There is no line when we arrive at the amusement park–one benefit to our tardiness. It’s now technically lunch time, but we decide to risk a hunger meltdown in order to make it onto the hourly train tour. Twenty minutes later, I’m reclined against the train bench, slathered in sunscreen, fingers wrapped around an iced mocha, listening to “Tilly” and “Levy” search for Sasquash in the Wild West. Bumping along in the warm, open air of Idaho, we pass butterflies and baby buffalo, as well as fake wolves, black bears and a skunk that sprays water at us from its bottom. For this single half hour, we smile at each other, relaxed and happy; it was all worth it, for this moment.

At the restaurant, it takes over an hour to receive our food. We know this because an entire new train tour has boarded, departed and returned–and the only item the waitress has delivered to our table is a pitcher of water. Matthias has turned pale with sunken eyes, and Emilia is haphazardly rearranging the silverware with motions each time more frantic and unpredictable, an indication that she is teetering dangerously on the border of another massive tantrum. She downs an adult-sized glass of ice water, then most of a strawberry lemonade. We make the mistake of suggesting she hold off on the lemonade in order to save room for her lunch, which causes her to consume the entire glass of pink liquid in one continuous, persistent slurp.

It is 3:00pm when we finish up our dry hamburgers and deflated french fries. Ready for the fun to begin! 

“Let’s go back,” Emilia requests. Great, she is ready to head to the rides!

She tugs my arm in a particular manner, and my hope vanishes in an instant like a popped birthday balloon. 

“Let’s go back!” I don’t yet know what she means, but I already recognize the tone, and it’s not good. It’s a matter-of-fact command layered over desperate urgency, and it clues me in that she is not asking for something that is possible under the current circumstances. 

“Let’s go back where we was before,” she elaborates. “With the bed, where I was sleeping. And there’s a card and you scan it like this.” She makes a swift motion with her hand portraying the swiping of a hotel key card across the door handle lock.

“The hotel?” I confirm, attempting to hold back the panic from my voice.

I lure Emilia out of the restaurant with the promise to purchase her a green gun, and she relents. 

We stumble into the carnival game section, and one activity has Pokemon stuffed animals as prizes. I pay ten dollars for eight wiffle ball throws, watching as the family in front of us tosses each of theirs into the unmarked holes and walks away prize-less.

Matthias chucks his first ball directly into a blue hole. He screams with unbridled joy, leaping into the air with such enthusiasm that the spectators around us begin applauding and pumping their fists as if he has taken first place in a marathon. 

All of mine bounce into the losing circles, but Emilia hurls a ball into another green hole. They both select a Pikachu stuffie. Our luck has turned, and I metaphorically wipe the sweat off my forehead in relief. 

“Shall we head to the rides?” I coax. But they have spotted the arcade, and Emilia has her eyes fixed on the tiny rubber ducks in the prize case. The ones they receive at the dentist and bring home from Farelli’s pizza down the street from our house. She has dozens of them at home.

“I want a duckie.” The words are uttered with such charm, her tiny hand outstretched towards the display of toys. A tantrum is imminent in T minus thirty-five seconds. 

I throw five bucks into the change machine, and we begin throwing skee balls. The man at the machine next to us has a tangled pile of blue tickets spilling onto the floor from the dispenser. We only need 75 for a duckie; this looks promising. Emmy points a gentle index finger at his tickets, grinning up at me.

“Don’t touch my tickets,” the man scolds. Man, as in, an adult.

“Sorry.” I’m immediately annoyed that I apologized. If a kid touched my tickets at an amusement park arcade, I would smile at them. 

We depart from the arcade a half hour later, a yellow duckie in Emilia’s happy clutches. This is going great, I think with optimism.

“I want to go back,” she whines.

“Back to the arcade?”

“No.”

“Back to the rides?”

“No, back to the place where we was before, with the bed.”

Help me.

I buy her a vanilla ice cream and snap pictures of her in an ornate, wooden rocking chair, gulping down her treat as she plays with duckie. She looks so happy.

“Let’s go back.”

We manage to advance a few paces. Emilia plops onto a hot cement bench, and I readjust my expectations again. I breathe and settle down next to her. She requests to leave the park a few more times, and I brace myself for the tantrum, but she distracts herself by removing her sandals and pouring the three dollar water from her bottle onto her bare feet. Drop by drop, she shakes it from the drinking spout, cooling her toes and drenching the bench. She makes footprints and chuckles. I observe the people passing by–relaxed couples without kids strolling with their five-scoop ice cream, macho tattooed daddies pushing strollers, moms carrying multiple babies at once. 

After about an hour on the bench, the boys locate us and convince us to ride the bumper boats. The water is freezing, and Emilia won’t let me help her steer, so we end up stuck in the middle of a group of boats that are all shooting at me in the face. My emotions of the day all bubble to the surface, and as the water sprays relentlessly into my eyes and nose, I nearly panic with the sensation of not being able to breathe. 

Our clothes soaked from top to toe, we head to the restrooms to change. As I’ve got my shorts down around my ankles, Emilia suddenly decides she must leave the stall in this very instant. Normally, I can say, “Hold on, don’t open the door yet,” and she will beam at me, relock it, spread her arms wide across the door and say, “I’ll go like this so no one can come in and see you.”

But she must sense the hint of urgency in my voice, because she escalates in a second to high-pitched wailing. “I want to get out!” She flings open the door, and the mom waiting in line looks at me in my underwear. A third mom, registering the situation, sprints like a Ninja from the next stall to offer assistance. 

“Here, I’ll hold the door for you!” 

Emilia is hysterical, as if I am holding her in a jail cell; I manage to tug my drenched shorts back up before the door bursts open. The howling ceases in an instant. I share a look with the other moms, and it’s clear they have all been here before. 

On the kiddie train ride, Emilia shrieks with the kind of laughter that causes amnesia about the realities of the day. We have had so much fun.

“Mommy, put your hands in the air!”

She glances up at the trees above our head on the ride. “Mommy, look! A big stick! A really large, big stick!” This is what she notices as we whip around the loop-de-loop.

“How was your day? Did you have fun?” I ask my daughter as we leave the park that night. She smiles and nods. 

“Actually,” she clarifies. “It was a little bad.” 

I inquire as to the reason. Maybe it was the way I ripped away her show this morning, before she was ready. Or the way I tried to force her to the rides, before she was ready. 

“Matty was hitting me on the train,” she tells me with a devilish smile. He was not.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, and Mickey was hitting me too.” As in, Mickey Mouse.

The rest of the family has caught up with us at the entrance, and I urge Emilia towards the car. 

“No,” she states, firmly seated on the bench outside the theme park. “I want to keep telling about bad things.”

“Okay, what else happened today that was bad?”

“Matty took a picture and he didn’t put a happy face. He put a bad face, and that was bad.” She is bursting with the hilarity of her own jokes.

That night, I review with my children the expectations for the following morning three separate times. First, we’ll use the bathroom. Then, we’ll go downstairs and eat breakfast…

The next morning’s routine is flawless; everyone is in a great mood. I’m forced to acknowledge internally that the previous day’s disaster was on us–the parents–not my four-year-old. And I forgive myself, because I’m human.

At the water park, in the wave pool, Emilia wriggles her torso from my protective hands and yells, “I can jump!” as if to tell me, “Let me do this myself.” Queen of Silverwood. La Reina del Bosque Plateado.

She lets the waves crash over her, into her face, up her nose.

“Hay una ola en mis ojos!” (“There’s a wave in my eyes!”) I blow across her eyelids, and she giggles. She floats on her back in the most relaxed posture, as a new set of waves thrash her around. I hold back from rescuing her.

Watching her, I honestly believe that she would survive an actual sea storm; she would fight her way back to shore as the turbulent waves crashed into her tiny, solid body.

I pray she never stops diving headfirst into the water. I hope she doesn’t compromise her fighting spirit for anything or anyone–not to avoid being late, or to please Mom and Dad, or to maximize the dollar-to-fun ratio at an amusement park. Not to comply with someone else’s demands for the sake of their convenience, when she has a different need, or a better idea.

I hope she crushes the waves, and lets them crash over her, and gets back up and continues being Queen of the World, la Reinita del Bosque Plateado.