Boy, are my arms tired

Welp, just flew back from Christmas in Texas last night. Where Anony-meme and anonybabe's great grandparents live (now christened Gigi Dot and Gigi Ed).

Man, travelling with a child is hard. Even a quiet, relatively good child.

I love going to see these grandparents. They live in the hill country of Texas, which is beautiful; they retired there to a drafty and cluttered house at the foot of a hill, adjacent to a field and a creek of their own. They have five children, all of whom love to visit them, in no small part because of the area they moved to. There is always some sort of run-in with nature while I'm there, good and bad.

This trip there was an inundation of thousands of blackbirds (grackles? I don't know what they were, although my granddad and an uncle and two of my aunts could name them) in their backyard for about 10 minutes. They were just passing through. My aunt & mom called everyone to the kitchen window to see. And then there were two bucks in the area tusselling. They were sighted twice. "They're just playing; practicing, see? They aren't really serious. If they were, boy, they would really be hurting each other." (This from my grandfather, who grew up in San Antonio, but has the country common sense of someone who had to know how to clean fish and build things and take care of any problem as it arose. He was an engineer for the phone company by trade, but as long as I've known him he had an easy appreciation for nature. He doesn't romanticize it, but he doesn't try to eradicate it. I get the impression he feels we all have our place on this rock...he feels he has the right to get along as much as his fellow fish and racoons and ants and stickers. I've known him to shoot or drown animals that were harrassing the chickens or eating the vegetables, but only after he tried trapping them and setting them loose miles from their property. A softy deep down, but a practical one.)

Other trips included a trio of baby foxes abandoned by their mother (my granddad left out dog food for them), a biblical infestation of grasshoppers in the guest house (my hubby spent half the night trying to kill them all), the occasional scorpion (my grandfather pooh poohs them as not too troubling "I've only been stung twice the whole time we've lived here; they'll only sting you if you apply pressure, you see"), and the alway ubiquitous mounds of fire ants. You just have to watch where you step when you walk down to the creek.

When I was 20, I lived one summer with these grandparents. I've always had a special connection with my grandmother (who is now sinking rather pleasantly into dementia) there. So long short of it is, I like going there a lot.

But this trip I was in a sleepy haze. I flew down with just myself and anonybabe, sleep deprived after a late night packing and then a very early morning flight. Little missy was quiet on the plane, but fidgety. She did eventually go to sleep and I napped with her in my arms, grateful for a moment's peace. Then we had a car ride home with my mom and a crotchety and slightly off-his-rocker uncle, who when we asked him to exit so we could go to a grocery store on the way home, took a wrong turn and then was determined not to turn around...it usually takes less than an hour to get home from the airport, and it took us three, in a carseat that wasn't right for Anonybabe so I kept giving her snacks to keep her quiet and holding her head to the carseat to insure she wouldn't get whiplash as my crazy uncle sped up to get right behind cars that were going too slow for him and then slammed on the brakes. At least he was predictable with his braking and I knew when to hold Anonybabe's head.

Anonyhubby didn't follow us out until a couple of days later, and even though my mom and grandma wanted to hold and help with the baby, there was still a fair amount of caretaking I did on my own. Being away from home made it just a little more exhausting to make her food and change her diapers and put her to sleep. I could really feel how much it was taking me away from one-on-one time with everyone else. There was one nice moment, when my grandmother was feeling sick, and I climbed into bed with her so we could warm our socked feet on each other's legs and chat. But that only lasted 10 minutes before we were called into open Christmas presents and the spell was broken. Oh, and my grandma and I did lie on the kitchen floor one night while Anonybabe practiced pulling herself up on my legs and then plopping herself down on her bottom. Pulling up, plopping down, pulling up, plopping down. She was great at it by the end of the holiday. I was so proud.

But generally I felt tired, everyone around me looked tired. Having a baby is such a blessing and a curse. I don't know; this trip made me really feel like time is marching on.