My daughter wants to type this blog post. She’s sitting on my lap PreSSGING al
l the fun buttons!! I think she has a future in writing 😉
I have proceeded to lay her upside down on my lap. That worked for about 2 seconds. She’s up again and I’m holding her on my shoulders. Ah, parenthood.
So, this past Labor Day weekend, my dad and I drove my little ones to the “home place” – my mother’s parents’ old house in North Carolina. What could be like an 8 hour drive with the usual two short meal + bathroom breaks turned into about a 12 hour drive (we made 5 or 6 stops). That’s to be expected, though, with a 3 year old and a 1 year old! We had a few challenging moments, but no major meltdowns on the way down or back up, so I consider it a huge WIN!! I’m so glad we did it. I’ve been wanting to take that drive with my dad for a while now. We bonded over political conversations and the Frozen soundtrack on repeat. And it may very well have been the last time we got to see the house, as it is now for sale.
It’s a beautiful, red brick ranch style house. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, huge basement, and an attic. In its prime it had the most cozy, comfortable, right at home feeling. It hasn’t been lived in for a while, now, so it’s changed. Even so, the memories remain! My cousin and I doing somersaults and backflips over the living room sofa, playing the (now terribly out of tune) piano and opening presents (I think I asked for Barbies fourteen years in a row…) together with my aunts, playing pick up sticks with Grandmother in the dining room (she never let me cheat!), picking figs with my Granddaddy (I LOVE fresh figs!), making home videos with my uncles.
We spent a few hours out in the big, grassy, front yard (a nice change from the parking lot we usually play in). I showed my son how to climb the trees I used to climb and pet the caterpillars I used to pet (someone recently brought to my attention that the fuzzy caterpillars are often poisonous! Why did no one tell me this before?? I may have been risking my life and my child’s life this whole time…)
OF COURSE, we stopped to see my collective best friend – D’s entire family. A whole nother rush of memories! Sadly, we could only spend one day together, so I could only have like one half conversation with each individual… Also, my children have me running this way and that every 90 seconds, so it’s hard to carry an actual fluid conversation to begin with. Anyway, there’s always next time!
I took some cute photos along the way. Had to commemorate my children playing with all these wonderful people and beautiful animals we don’t normally get to see. Enjoy!
(Please excuse the quality. iPhone brags about their photos on billboards, but apparently those are taken by some markedly more skilled photographers than I!)
