Listen to the Rain

Friday morning sashagee went out to her parents, and I followed after work. And then Saturday morning, we woke up at 6:15 a.m.--well, Laila woke up at 6:15 and so we also woke up--we all ate breakfast, and then we piled into her parents' care to travel to Indiana to go visit her family. The last time we were supposed to go, I got what turned out to be COVID and stayed home while sashagee and Laila went, so I hadn't yet met most of her cousins and their children yet. She gave me a bunch of warnings that they were loud and might be overwhelming, and was I ready?

The car ride went fine. It was Laila's first long car ride as an aware being, since the last time she was seven months old and just slept the whole time, and she did okay. We stopped once at a place called Fair Oaks Farm just off the highway and let Laila run all around while we bought milkshakes (or at least, I bought a milkshake and sashagee's stepmother got ice cream), and then got back into the car and finished the drive to Muncie. We went over to sashagee's birthday grandmother's for a few minutes and then borrowed the car to visit her mother and other grandmother, which is where we spent most of the evening. sashagee's mother had broken her foot a few weeks ago and wasn't mobile at all, so Laila was a bit bouncing off the walls there, especially since sashagee's mother has two small dogs. Laila kept trying to grab their toys, climb in the cage, wandering around her small apartment, and it was only when the paper and pens came out and she could color that she finally slowed down.

When we got to sashagee's grandmother, sashagee was at first worried she wasn't home because she was so used to other people always being there, but there was nothing to worry about. Her house was very homely, laid out length-wise so you could see from the family room at one end through the kitchen to the living room at the other, and it just screamed "Grandma's house" will the jars labeled "Flour" and "Sugar" and "Tea" and the pictures of descendants framed and placed on nearly every flat surface.

At this point Laila was slowing down, so she spent a bit of time running around but started to get tired, and we spent the last half an hour watching Ponyo until we knew we had to get back to the hotel. Even with that, Laila did fall asleep on the way back, though B"H she woke up when we got back and didn't fuss while we prepped her for bed. Back at the hotel I spent an hour in the hotel's exercise room getting in all the Apple Watch exercise time that I had missed out on during a day of driving and visiting, and fell asleep not that much later.

This time Laila slept in until 8:15 a.m., and we all got ready and then went out to eat the hotel's complimentary breakfast of scrambled eggs, French toast, bagels, and coffee/tea (the tea was awful, the rest of the food was fine) and then went back to sashagee's birthday grandmother's before we split off again to go to visit her mother and other grandmother and drop off USB drives containing every picture we've taken of Laila for the last three years--both of them have Android phones and thus aren't on any of the photo albums--and then head back to the party.

The warnings were unnecessary! I didn't get interrogated and it wasn't as loud as I was warned, though apparently this was also because of the circumstances. sashagee said that one whole branch of the family was basically out sick, so there's another two dozen people who could have showed who didn't. I had some nice chats and spent some time chasing Laila around, but we only ended up being able to stay for two hours. sashagee's estranged sister was there too, but I didn't talk to her at all--she didn't talk to anyone in her family until sashagee's father tried to talk to her, which apparently didn't go well--and even ignored Laila when Laila went up to her. Well, her loss. The rest of the party was lovely!

Very different from my small family but a fun time. I'd be happy to go back again.