We have an obscene amount of broken boogie boards at our house. Tragically, the above picture is only a portion of what we have. I found several other broken boards in storage today, but there’s a large box on top of them that would have to be moved by someone significantly more ambitious than I’ll ever be, and he’s on the phone, so those boards are still there, hanging out in the bowels of my house.
For those of you who don’t know, a boogie board is a board used for riding waves that is made out of foam (think Styrofoam), is rectangular in shape and is shorter than a traditional surf board. Frequent any of the many flashy large beach stores with names like Shark Attack or Eagles and you’ll likely see hundreds of boards with all sorts of colors and patterns. They’re also known as body boards, but boogie board, the brand name, seems to prevail, in my circles at least.
Having an actual boogie board collection may sound rather strange to off-islanders. And it is strange, sort of. But here’s what happened. When we first moved here, one of our first purchases was a boogie board. It also turned out to be one of our most significant purchases. From toddlerhood on, all three of our children have derived countless hours of entertainment from their boogie boards. To give some perspective here, they use their boogie boards more than they use their bikes. However, since the boards are made out of relatively cheap material, they’re hardly indestructible. And when you add to that the fact that my small people have become masters at using them for unintended uses, like as shields or even weapons in their ongoing Lord of the Rings beach reenactment, or as mats to sit on and slide down the deck stairs, for example, the boards’ life spans are often dramatically reduced.
From what I can tell, going through multiple boards really is fairly commonplace. It’s the saving of all the broken boards that’s not so normal.
I really don’t understand the logic behind saving every single one of these broken boards, but I think it goes something like this:
Keep all boogie boards, just in case.
Like, what if all the other broken boogie boards mysteriously disappeared, and the only boogie board left was this one we almost threw away. And then one day, I find a clever craft idea on someone’s blog that calls for, among other things, a broken boogie board, and thanks the stars above, I kept that one broken boogie board that managed to not mysteriously disappear with the other boards.
See what I’m saying?
Or, everything in my house gets blown away in a hurricane, except a few of my broken boogie boards, because the leashes get stuck on a palm tree that manages to hang on for dear life during a Category 5 (a “There goes the island!!†level hurricane). When it’s safe to return to the island, I arrive on my disheveled lot to find I still have several broken boogie boards clinging to the lone piece of vegetation left on my property. Profoundly grateful for both my broken boogie boards and my parents who forced me to attend survival summer camp for six consecutive summers (I did not, in fact, really attend survival camp, but just roll with me here for the sake of the argument), I quickly fashion a lean-to out of broken boards and move Island Dad and the three small people in for the winter.
Okay, so yeah, I’m the woman too lazy to move a cardboard box right now, but they say people often respond with hidden fortitude in a crisis, so I’m cautiously optimistic.
I’m not 100% sure of this, but I think this is the thinking behind the broken board collection.
Or maybe there just was no thinking involved in this decision. At all.
Thus you have my thinking for today.