This week’s update is a bit delayed because we all went down to Tulsa to visit my mom, sister, and brother-in-law. It’s a multi-hour drive from where we are and we embarked with a fair amount of trepidation given that we would be asking two children to sit still for longer than is natural. Amazingly they did pretty well (hooray for portable DVD players and car lighter adapters!), though several more pit stops were necessary. Here’s a fun fact: There’s not much to do in a McDonald’s parking lot. When did they get rid of all the fast food restaurant playgrounds? It’s kind of sad that most entertaining thing Sam found during her play breaks was a large pile of gravel. Though, to her credit, she did christen it “dinosaur Mountain” and did her best to climb it. Repeatedly.
Once we got there things got better. Well, slightly. There were monumental rainstorms most of the time we were in Tulsa, which meant that Sam didn’t really get to leave the house much. And when she did, she was immediately assaulted by mosquitoes the size of pit bulls so that by her second day there she was so thoroughly bitten that she looked like she was covered in bright red polka dots.
Actually, we did go one day to the new Aquarium in Jenks, Oklahoma. For Sam this was probably the high point of the visit. Though she may appear entranced by the charms of nature when confined to a 500 gallon Plexiglas jug, she actually started the visit off by flitting from one display to the next, pausing barely long enough to identify its contents before running to the next. “Oh, a fish. Let’s go to the next one. Oh, a turtle. Let’s go to the next one. Oh, a shark. Let’s go to the next one. Oh, I don’t know what that is. Let’s go to the next one.”
Eventually after she had briefly smeared her fingerprints and/or forehead over every tank in the place, Sam did slow down enough to revisit each of them at a more leisurely pace. She touched stingrays, she fed turtles, she gazed at fish. It was grand. Also, we went to the mall. Yay!
Sam seemed to take (again) pretty raedily to her relatives, warming up to them in no time. She even colored a picture for her Aunt Shawn and engaged Uncle Brent in a round of a game I like to call “IT’S A MONSTER! RUN!!” which is pretty much what it sounds like. Of course, it helped that they gave her presents, like a British police officer helmet, which she used to go on patrol looking for soccer hooligans.
Sam also took fairly well to her sleeping arrangements, which consisted of her own bed in the spare bedroom. Well, eventually. On the first night five minutes after I put her down I heard screaming. I opened the door and turned on the light to find her trying to exit the room via the closet. She did better after we gave her a night light.
Mandy, of course, did just fine. She mostly slept on the drives and was happy to just hang out with whoever wanted to hold her while we were there. It was kind of fun to wash her in the sink, too. I’m not quite sure that she’ll weather traveling so well after she gains more mobility, though.
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