Last Sunday evening, we returned home from an extremely chaotic yet strangely wonderful trip, with a lot of travel packed into 72 hours. Matt's brother got married on Saturday; Matt was the best man and Suzannah was a flower girl, so our weekend was full of wedding festivities on top of all the travel.
The actual wedding took place in Emerson, Nebraska -- a tiny town about a thirty-minute drive from Sioux City, Iowa, where Dave and Tia live. We flew into Omaha on Thurday night -- late Thursday night, because our flight out of Denver was delayed for a few hours. (Do you know what's not fun? Waiting in a crowded airport with a two-year-old, long past her bedtime.) We landed around twelve-thirty in the morning, long after the shuttle to our hotel had stopped running, so we picked up the rental car -- thankfully, they were still open -- and tried to find it ourselves. By then it was after one in the morning and we were all a little delirious, having spent twelve hours traveling, and we got a little lost, but finally we carried a sleeping Suzannah into our hotel and tucked her, still sleeping, into bed. She hardly stirred; she slept curled with her "Lambie" (her new lovey from Auntie Morgan -- she is so attached to it!) all by herself while Matt and I collapsed on the other bed. We requested two beds this time; we haven't shared a hotel room since October, which was sort of a disaster since Suzannah is too big for a pack 'n play and is also an incredible bed hog these days, so I thought our best bet would be to have two queen-sized beds, and she could either have one to herself or sleep with one of us. This proved to be a good idea.
On Friday morning, we "slept in" but still rose after only six hours of sleep. Matt and Suzannah played in the hotel pool for awhile, and we were both surprised and completely delighted at how much Suzannah finally enjoyed it. She was so tentative at first, only dipping her toes in the water or sprawling on her belly at the pool's edge and splashing her hands, but finally she allowed Matt to bring her all the way in.
I cannot get enough of her laughter, her easy joy.
We checked out of the hotel and drove around Omaha looking for a place to eat lunch, finally settling on this cute little European cafe downtown (let me tell you about my colleagues' raised eyebrows -- they have something like that in Omaha? Like Omaha, Nebraska?) before embarking on our journey to Sioux City. It was a short drive for this Montana girl, but it was lovely. I'm not ashamed to admit it; I love the Midwest. I love the fields, the open spaces, the sky, the people, the road. I love all the little places you stumble upon only if you're driving, the places no one would ever consider as a destination. I feel healthy and I can breathe deeply.
Highlights of the weekend: Suzannah loving her flower girl dress -- she kept crouching to make it puff up around her. Spending time with Matt's parents and hanging with family we haven't seen in a year-and-a-half. All of Matt's cousins loving on Suzannah. Good food. Open spaces. Cozy stolen moments of reading Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Really rockin' Mexican food after the wedding rehearsal. Cuddling with Suzannah in the bed we ended up sharing for two nights in Sioux City. Realizing that my daughter was rising above every expectation I had for how she'd travel on the airplane -- she was so fabulously chill about it all, which was such a welcome change from December of 2007. We didn't even have her DVD's playing much (although she did eat a lot of snacks -- it was like such a novelty for her that she could have another pack of Nemo fruit snacks if she wanted, or another granola bar); she was so content to just flip through books and magazines with us, or play with Matt's headphones. She cried on the final leg of our trip as we descended into Seattle, but that's because I had to wake her up -- she'd been sleeping on me for a good part of the flight from Denver -- and buckle her into her own seat, and she was just so exhausted I think she'd had it, but I figured the people seated around us still had it pretty good. Three hours on a plane with a two-year-old and ten minutes of crying? Not too shabby. Actually, she received plenty of compliments; people can't resist her huge blue eyes. She just handled it all so well -- the flights, the hours in the Denver airport, the car rides, the hotels. It was all new, and she just seemed so happy and curious and easy about it all.
Not-so-high points: The wedding reception -- although, I must hasten to add, not because of the reception itself. Unfortunately, this was the hardest part of the entire weekend. We'd spent most of the day at the church in Emerson; they had lunch for us at noon, pictures at 1:30, and the wedding at 4:30 -- which amounted to a long afternoon without a nap for our little lady. Suzannah did really well, especially since there was a play room in the basement and she had plenty of cousins to entertain her, but by the time the wedding was over and we'd all driven back to Sioux City, she was just so done. She'd passed out the minute Matt's mom buckled her into her car seat (I was riding a trolley with the wedding party!) and she had absolutely no interest in waking up and partying. I couldn't really blame her. She threw her only real tantrum of the entire trip there, so I spent plenty of time in the basement of the Masonic Lodge trying to calm her down while Matt took care of his best man duties -- the toast, the bridal party dance, etc. Neither one of us ate much, which was also unfortunate, because the food was actually freaking fantastic, especially for wedding food. It was simple -- barbecue chicken and beef, cheesy potatoes, fruit salad, green beans, rolls -- but just, I don't know, so good. I was intensely crabby that I had to leave most of it.
Suzannah did, however, rally in time for the cake -- chocolate with raspberry filling -- and cheesecake. The cake pretty much erased my crabbiness. Well, that and the fact that when Suzannah smiles, she's so beautiful and sweet that I pretty much forget every tantrum she's ever had.
(My students wanted to know if she actually "did the flower girl thing." And she didn't, really -- at least not in the sense that she walked up the aisle after the bridal party but before the bride. I never actually thought she would; she'd never consent to watching her parents walk away like that, leaving her standing between rows and rows of beaming strangers. We actually had to do some creative work to get her in the bridal party pictures at all; she finally consented to being in a few with her daddy holding her. I didn't even try to see what she'd do for the processional. I thought it would be too disruptive for me to have to trot back there and retrieve a wailing, fatigued, confused toddler after the bridal party had already walked up there, so I just carried her to my seat in the front. I rocked her while she rested wearily against me, moaning softly, "Da-aadddy. Da-aadddy." It was hot in the church, and she didn't understand why he was standing so close to us without picking her up, but I think -- or hope -- she was quiet enough so it didn't really bother anyone.)
The wedding, by the way, was lovely, and very much worth the trip.
The other not-so-high point of the weekend was dealing with United Airlines. We flew Frontier on the way, and they were fine. United didn't allow us to choose our seats when we booked our flight; they said we'd take care of that at check-in. But then they didn't have any of us sitting together -- hello, we have a two-year-old, and at least one of us needs to sit with her, and everyone will be happier if we both can. In order to guarantee that we could sit with our own two-year-old child, they tried to get us to pay the extra fifty bucks for Economy Plus or whatever the heck it is, and if you want to get my husband on a soapbox, by the way, ask him what he thinks of that. On our flight to Denver we managed to convince people sitting near us to trade seats (it wasn't difficult; who wants to sit next to a two-year-old, right?) and in Denver we finally convinced a ticket agent to move some seats around, which happened about five minutes before we boarded the plane. It was just enough for me to declare about ten thousand times that I am most definitely through with air travel and I don't care how far we have to drive, I LOVE TO DRIVE.
Matt, of course, seemed more or less unruffled and reassured me about eighty-five times that it would all work out just fine.
We're home now and things feel normal again; I spent Monday morning unpacking, putting away the Easter decorations, and doing laundry (thank goodness for the WASL testing schedule; I only had to teach one class after lunch) and Matt mowed the lawn when he came home from work. The day was sublime. Every time I went outside I smelled grass and trees and felt the sun on my arms, and for a few moments, I could actually smell summer, could literally feel it on my skin.
Suzannah bounced right back into her routine, too -- hugging and kissing me when I dropped her off in the morning before scampering off to get down to some serious play. She had good outside time this week, and she smells like summer, too. Every day I'm struck by how much I love this person she is becoming, how I love being her mother more and more each day, even just in goofy little moments like tonight when she took very little interest in her dinner until I said, "Okay, jammies then?" And she sat down and picked up her fork and scooped up some of her untouched rice and said pointedly, "No. I eating, Mama." Then before bed, she wanted to rock with me in the big chair, so I scooped her up and we settled into the recliner, where we rocked quietly for awhile. She stroked my hair, very, very softly, and said, "Mommy. Oh, Mommy." And my heart. Oh. My heart, it is full.
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