The best part about tagging along on someone else's vacation is that when it's over, you're not as bummed out because it isn't something you've been putting a lot of thought into. You go, you have fun, it ends, and it's ok. We really did have a great long-long weekend on the Cape with Mike's family. Every year his eldest brother and wife generously open up their end-of-the-summer rental to the whole family, and it's become a tradition that we meet up at some point over the course of the week. This year we stayed three nights, but all four brothers and their families, plus the matriarch (grandpa's in post-surgical rehab) overlapped for a whole day and night, which is a rare occurrence. We went to the beach, sat around and caught up, went out for a nice dinner, all the nice things you do when you're on vacation time. HR was thrilled to hang around his cousins - he's not quite sure about how to interact with the little girl who is four months younger than him, they mostly played side-by-side (babies are so weird), but he does certainly idolize his 10- and 12-year-old big boy cousins and it means a lot to us that he gets to spend this kind of time with them as well as his aunts and uncles and grandma.
For all of the car time (including a whopping 6 hours of driving to and from Connecticut on Saturday - more on this in a bit), HR was not a perfect passenger, but we've come a long way. I was particularly not psyched about the driving because he was a nightmare on the drive down - I now realize that, illustrating yet again how our baby is not like most babies, driving in the day is actually better than nighttime for him because messing with his bedtime routine (we do all the other parts, bath, bottle, etc. but then put him into a carseat instead of a crib) makes him an emotional wreck. But that was the worst of it, and we got it overwith on the relatively short drive from Boston.
Saturday our niece, Mike's youngest brother's little one, turned a year old. That is no mean feat considering she came into the world really, really early (and tried to make her entrance really, REALLY early). None of us take for granted that she's here, let alone how amazingly she's progressed. We would happily have driven twice as far with a screaming baby to be at her celebration on Saturday. Happily it didn't come to that, but it was a great thing to be there and sing and watch her lick the frosting off a comically large cupcake. I think this every day, but don't say it often enough: I'm so lucky to be in these families, the one that has to love me because I share their blood, and the one that has to love me because I married in.
As for the hurricane, we all made it back to our respective homes safely on Saturday (if not ideally - sorry about that Stuart and Michele!). The storm really spared us here, which is awesome. And now we're embarking upon Project: Sippy Cup in our home, which so far is causing less havoc than I had feared. Ask me again when we take away the morning and nighttime bottles.
So I guess I can say that my extended weekend of beachy, lobstery, outdoor-showery goodness serves as the last hurrah of the summer for me. I know we've still got Labor Day and all and it'll be hot until October at the earliest but for me, the mindset is switched over and there's no going back. I'll give you another week of summer songs for the hell of it though.
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