It's single digits outside for over a week now. Earlier in the week we were way below zero. It is officially WARMER in Russia. And they're knee deep in snow, which makes the freezing temps easier to bear. Yesterday we got excited over snow flurries, but they didn't stick around. Further up north they did, but not around our area. And, in my book, this sucks. If I have to wear two pairs of pants and three shirts, double my kid's coats, and deal with a frozen car that decided to complain about the temperature, at least I want to be doing it in a foot of snow. That way, when I wake up in the morning, I will have the pleasure of investigating the tracks my four-legged neighbors left in my backyard while partaking in my morning tea. All I see now if dead grass. Same view as when it was over 100F. Um... no... not into it anymore...
Time for some retail therapy.
I was feeling like a white bikini. Don't know why. I bet I saw one in SI Swimsuit issue a year back and it's been lodged into my brain ever since. The white part I can't explain. The bikini part – I can. Two years ago we vacationed in Miami South Beach. It was a family vacation with Danny (who was 4 at the time) in tow. We were in heaven. My husband and I were thoroughly entertained every day by people-watching and spoiled by hotel staff (Lowes Miami Beach is the place to stay) and my son chased after a Brazilian model with long brown hair and floss for a bikini. I brought way too much clothes and one piece swimsuits. Big mistake. Huge!
I was miserable. Not that my suits were not cute, they were, and they were covering and tightening and lifting in all the right places. All the wrong things when you're in SoBe. You see, SoBe beaches are topless. And pretty much all of Florida beaches are full of Europeans that don't wear much on a beach. Any beach. Men wear tiny Speedos, most of it covered by a very large (and hairy) gut. Women of all sizes wear dental floss. The ones that one wearing one piece suits (like me) are from Midwest USA (also me). So after spending a week observing, and sweating since I stuffed myself like a sausage into a Donna Karan slimming concoction, I started thinking that maybe it's time to wear a bikini. Again. I used to wear them BD (before Danny), but AD (after Danny) I switched to a community-pool-mother-appropriate wear which is a one piece suit that covers as much as possible from waist down.
Then, my best friend came to visit from Russia last summer.
And knocked some sense into me. When we went to our community pool to lounge around while Danny was having his swim lesson, she looked at my one piece modest number and said: "Why?" She was wearing a two piece ruffled bikini. "What is this? No one wears this in Europe," she commented. After she left, I spent the rest of summer thinking about what she said as I observed ruffled black and brown full-coverage numbers in the pool. And promised myself to buy a bikini. Which I did last week.
It's white and made out of triangles and straps. They're much thicker than dental floss, don't worry. It was waiting for me in my mailbox when I went to get Danny from school. I sat in my car, badly parked (who can park on a curb?), with my buttwarmer on high and heat blasting, all bundled up, unwrapping the package and investigating tiny pieces of bright white fabric. It was frozen, like the rest of my mail. I tried it on as soon as I got home (it warmed up in my purse)... I look extremely European!
Now, if only my treadmill would just arrive already...
