Paul Fredenberg | Contributor

The kids pressed snugly up to the glass at the aquarium, smiling and watching the fish casually glide by while I, for the umpteenth time, stood and counted them.

1,2,3,4,5,6,7.

“Look, Daddy,” someone said, “it’s a queen parrotfish.” There was excited pointing and gesticulation. “It actually sleeps in a protective bubble of its own mucus.”

We were in Florida, a place of pure, limitless recreation. A place where carefree, brown people leisurely steer their sunkissed boats, bikes and Buicks through the brilliant, unrelenting sunlight, between the beaches, malls and restaurants. As someone still cranking out an interminable daily quota of conference calls and spreadsheets, Florida makes me feel strange, guilty even.

Though I had made a vow to stay far from my laptop and phone, it turns out I still had plenty of work to do on this vacation.

I should have known as much. Any trip that starts with a 1,200 mile nonstop slog down I-75 is bound to be anything but a piece of cake. And any vacation involving seven small children is bound to be, if not enjoyable, at least a little bit sweaty too.

So at the aquarium, as the kids bounded from exhibit to exhibit, Alison and I moved slowly and methodically, like Secret Service agents, constantly monitoring the flanks, assessing potential threats, counting and recounting our precious litter.

All the instinctive parenting work gradually diminished the thrill of observing the exotic creatures up close in their simulated habitats. The alligators, for example, looked anything but intimidating and more like plastic facsimiles as they lounged perfectly still in their pen.

“I’d rather wrestle one of those than a thrashing, wailing, dripping bathtime toddler,” I thought to myself.

The sea cucumbers, I was told enthusiastically by one of the boys, spit their guts out of their rear ends when threatened. “Sounds familiar,” I said without even a passing glance, my eyes instead fixed on his brother wandering off toward a drinking fountain. “Sounds very familiar.”

1,2,3,4,5,6,7.

I was unmoved by a video featuring baby sea turtles trundling down the sand toward their first, anxious taste of seawater. I’d monitored that same phenomenon for six hours the previous day, as our baby, wearing a thick, protective shell of sunblock, instinctively and relentlessly pressed toward the perilous breaking waves.

While everyone today, understandably, worries about gas prices, I spent a good deal of the vacation concerned about sunblock prices. Several six ounce bottles of Coppertone set me back $8 apiece. Quick iPhone math at the checkout revealed a sobering reality: $4 a gallon gas seems quaint compared to $170 a gallon sunblock.

Despite the expensive protection, our tender Michigan skin, untouched by ultraviolet rays for nearly seven months, on the first day burned quickly to a red crisp.

And, so, to avoid the sun we had travelled so far to finally see again, for several days we abandoned the beach in favor of the aquarium and Busch Gardens where, to me, it felt like the dangerous predators were not the sharks and the lions and African crocodiles, but rather the souvenir shops, carnival games, overpriced restaurants and Elmo photo opportunities, all vying for a piece of the same vulnerable prey: my wallet.

We hustled to get our money’s worth, but likely spent more time with anxious toddlers scrambling for restrooms than we did on rides. Near the end of the trip, Alison snuck away momentarily on her own to try her hand at a big roller coaster. I was counting kids as she roared past us, screaming as she plummeted down a 200-foot vertical drop.

“For a moment I felt weightless,” she later told me. It wasn’t clear if the weightlessness had been due to the g-forces or because she was finally, albeit briefly, excused from work.

Back at the beach, on the last day of the trip, no one wanted to leave. One of the girls fell prostrate into the sand, refusing to move. I pleaded, begged, and bribed to no effect — so I snatched her up and carried her the quarter mile to the car. A cooler, beach chairs, football and umbrella in one arm, a thrashing, wailing, dripping alligator of a little girl in the other.

After I wrestled her safely into her carseat, my face drenched in effort, I reached into the cooler and chugged our last bit of pure, freshly-squeezed Florida orange juice, pausing to get one last look at the pristine Gulf shore. One last look at my vacation.

As I wiped a stray drop of juice from my chops, a beach-pail-yellow Ferrari Testarossa, the car of my childhood fantasies and a far cry from my big white Chevy van pockmarked with baseball-sized dents and plastered with ‘M Go Blue’ bumper stickers, pulled up slowly alongside us.

The driver, an older man with a deep, brown tan, and his wife stopped for a moment to observe us. Her face was pressed up against the window as she watched. I could read her lips.

“1,2,3,4,5,6,7.”

And there, in the carseat closest to the door, was the daughter I had carried from the beach. The couple pointed and smiled when they spotted her.

Like a queen parrotfish, asleep in a protective bubble of her own mucous.

Paul Fredenberg lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and seven children. He can be reached at psfredenberg@gmail.com.