It was a bad burn...

After spending a lot of time reading over at Mama's Losin' It, I've finally decided to take the plunge and participate in Mama Kat's Writers Workshop. Her writing prompts are always great and there's always something that I can relate to. The prompt I've chosen to write about today is...

"It was a bad burn. Tell about the worst sunburn you ever received. How did that happen!?!"

Now I must confess that with living 25 years of my life in sunny Florida I have had many, many sunburns. Bad sunburns. Some were self induced as I was often trying to get the perfect tan. I admit to slathering on baby oil as a teen and other stupidly unhealthy tricks of the trade. But the bad burn I'm going to tell you about was one that occurred when I was a kid and I can totally blame this on my parents! Ha! Not only is this a story of a bad sunburn but also of being humiliated. I can blame that on them, too. The opportunity doesn't happen often so I should certainly take advantage of it, right?

The year was 1986 I think and we had taken a cruise to the Bahamas, stayed a couple days on the island and then cruised on back to South Florida. I don't think there was as much awareness about the importance of protecting our skin from the sun back then, but hello! common sense. I was sent to spend many hours swimming in the pool and in the Caribbean Sea, playing games like the limbo and all that good stuff. I had a blast. But without a drop of sunscreen. Needless to say I also had a burn. The bright red, lobster hued, hurts really bad type of sunburn.

That night as the full effects of the burn made itself known, I hurt. Very.Badly. My dad tried to ease the pain by putting soaking wet cold towels on my back while I was laying in my bed. As the heat from my burning body would make the towels hot, he would refresh me by pouring more cold water (maybe the water from the melted ice bucket?) over me on top of the towels. Bless his heart, he tried to help. I'm sure you can imagine that the bed was soaking wet.

For the rest of our vacation I swam with a t-shirt on to keep the sunburn from getting worse. And my dad would repeat the cold water process at night so that I wasn't in too much pain to sleep. But a peculiar thing started to happen...I began noticing that every time the housekeeping staff would see me they would start snickering amongst themselves. It took a little while for me to realize that they were laughing at *me*. I was a kid at the time, but old enough to put two and two together. I think they thought the reason for the wet bed of mine that they changed each morning was because I was um...not properly potty trained. They must have thought I was wetting the bed. And that I had a HUGE bladder as the bedsheets were super soaked. I mentioned I was a kid, but I was a kid that was too old to be wetting the bed.

Upon this epiphany, I was so embarrassed. Mortified.

So there you have it. I'm not sure it was the worst sunburn I've had as far as burn and pain. But it was certainly the worst.sunburn.ever. And just so you know, I'm a sunscreen tyrant with Kelley and Bethany. They'll thank me one day!