On the road again...

Suzannah and I are in Bozeman for a few days. I felt like a road trip. Matt, unfortunately, couldn't come with us this time -- but he'll be with us in August when we head to Glacier Park, which is my favorite place in the entire world, and a place I've missed deeply for three years. This time it was just me, my daughter, and my mom, who flew out to meet us in Washington and keep us company on the drive through the mountains. Suzannah travels so well in the car, so it was mostly a pleasant trip, unless you count the speeding ticket I was stuck with shortly before we stopped in Moses Lake for lunch. Apparently I've been complaining about it, because my dad finally reminded me that I was going twelve miles over the limit and the patrol officer had every right to pull me over, but I'm still bitter, because a.) it was my first speeding ticket, and b.) 70 is a stupid speed limit in eastern Washington. Also, I put the cruise control on after that, and then EVERYONE PASSED ME. I don't want to talk about it.

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One of my favorite coming-home rituals is eating my dad's popcorn. He makes it in this ancient popcorn popper -- it was a wedding gift to my parents, and it's missing one of the handles, but it still makes the best popcorn I've ever tasted (and popcorn, my friends, is my weakness. Yes. My only one). Every time my dad hauls it out from underneath the island in the kitchen, he says, "You know, Mom and I used to grill minute steaks in this thing back in college." He broke it out last night at my request while we watched Into the Wild, once Suzannah finally fell asleep. I've been praying fervently that she falls into a somewhat normal sleeping schedule this week, because mah baby, she has worn me out. We pulled into the driveway just past midnight the day before yesterday, and suddenly my little girl, who'd fallen asleep, oh, forty miles earlier (on a 600+ mile drive, by the way) was suddenly and laughingly wide awake. She spent the next hour tearing gleefully around Grandpa and Grandma Griffith's house, hollering and squealing and generally creating quite a ruckus for this quiet little neighborhood. I am not going to tell you what time we all managed to get to sleep, or what time she woke me up the next morning. It's just too hard for me to talk about without weeping right now.

She slept well last night, thankfully, although she was full of all kinds of stalling tricks. She'd pretend she wanted to play The Hugging Game, arranging us very purposefully on the floor -- and then she'd laugh and scurry away. Finally, I told her very ominously that I was counting to three.

"One," I began.

"TWO!" she shrieked. Clearly, SHE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT (or my tone wasn't as ominous as I thought). Or she does, but figured she'd buy herself some time by making us laugh.

I spent most of yesterday trying to recover from Wednesday's drive. We took our time along the way, stopping in Spokane to walk Blondie and let Suzannah "get the wiggles out" down at Riverfront Park, where I decided to take Suzannah on the carousel. I thought maybe we'd sit on one of the benches, but she was really eyeing those horses, so at the last minute I swung her up on one. She gripped the pole easily, like she'd done this a million times and knew exactly what she was doing, like she was telling me, okay, Mama, I can take it from here, thanks. And as the carousel began to turn and her horse moved up and down, her face broke into a grin. I stood next to her, my arm loosely circling her hips, and watched her hair blow softly back from her face.

"Wow!" she said, over and over. She'd have ridden all afternoon if she could. As we walked away, she kept turning around to point and call out, "Horsies!" Her cheeks were flushed and she smelled like summer.

Today we stopped at the park before lunch, and she played on the swings and the slide for awhile. Her reaction to the swing was much like her reaction to the carousel; she grinned, she giggled, she said "Wow!" She refused to actually slide down the slide today, but she gamely climbed the steps anyway, several times. It's such a change from last summer, when she was so bald and tottered around like a drunken sailor, or from the summer before that, when she was all milk-drunk smiles and chubby thighs. I keep looking at this photo album my mom has in the living room, and I want to reach right into the pictures and nibble on those chubby little legs. ("Why do women always talk about eating babies?" my husband asks. "It's kind of creepy.")

We're having a great time. Summer is a fabulous time to be a mom.