North Carolina Visit

     On Tuesday, Oct 25, we got up at 5:30 to load the car and head out down to West Jefferson, North Carolina to visit my family.  My family tends to use the visit of one person to create a gathering, so I had scheduled our trip to coincide with my dad's trip up from Mississippi (to close down the Red Cabin for the winter, for those of you that know the Red Cabin).  Then my mom jumped on board, and by the time we arrived, Esme had one great-grandparent, three grandparents (and a great uncle), three aunts, three cousins, and two parents surrounding her.  Several other folks let us know they were sad they weren't going to be able to make it, but I don't know how much more visiting we could have done if more people had been there.  You see, my family also has a habit of driving ridiculous distances to stay places for short periods of time.  (That becomes important to understand when you realize this ends up being a four day trip with over 24 hours of it being on-the-road travel time.  With a five week old infant.)
     I don't know how many of you have ever loaded a car for travel with an infant, and those that have may not have done so in the last couple of decades with the advent of the car seat, but I can tell you that packing isn't the quick, methodical, let's get on the road activity that I'm used to.  Or it's not yet, at this point in our parenthood.  I knew the 6AM departure was optimistic, but when we rolled out of there at 7:40, I was a bit dismayed.  It was no big deal as we had no real agenda aside from enjoying our day's travel, but it took us over two hours to make coffee and put stuff in the car?  Really?
     The driving itself takes nine and a half hours, so it usually takes us about ten hours to get there.  (We don't tend to stop much, or for long.)  This trip was just over twelve hours.  Stops became both longer and more frequent (have you ever contemplated breast-feeding a child in a car seat?), and our innate tendency to ogle our child probably didn't help either.  (Our most frequent line at home these days starts with, "How did it get to be _______ already?  I just sat down with her five minutes ago...")  Overall, the ride was great.  Esme did a fabulous job and didn't give us any real difficulty the whole way.  I did notice a tendency on my part at the end of the trip to drive the twisty mountain roads quite a bit slower than is my norm, but having a baby asleep in the back is a great motivator to drive smoothly.
   We had a welcome committee waiting for us when we arrived, but almost half of them were up past their bedtimes by the time we brought in the first piece of gear, so the party didn't last long.  Which was fine with us as we were tired from the travel.  During the planning for the trip and the driving down, I wasn't sure what to hope for:  that Esme would sleep the whole way down, or that she would let us sleep throughout most of the first night there.  I didn't really entertain the possibility that both would happen.  Now, of course, neither actually happened -- Esme had never slept four hours in a row that I was aware of -- but she did astoundingly well on both fronts.  She did sleep the vast majority of the way down and the vast majority of that night.  (Did I mention she's five weeks old?  She's slept the vast majority of the time she's been alive thus far.)  In any case, I felt exceedingly grateful to her for continuing to allow at least me to get most of a night's rest.
     If you want to see more of what we did in North Carolina, see What's Up Doc?  Mostly it was visiting with family, eating well, reading, napping, and relaxing.  (And yes, napping and relaxing are two separate categories.  I would think that should go without saying.)  I will share one family tradition that my mom started with her grandchildren.  She found an old Chinese Medicine cabinet and has each of the infants pose in it.  Here, then, is the fourth grandchild, Esme, doing her best to fit inside the thing.

     In any case, after two days of family fun, we hopped back in the car for the return trip.  Esme still did a fabulous job, though perhaps more fussy than on the way down.  There were two momentous firsts on the way back.  Tina was in the back seat for a bit and she chose to read Esme her first book, The Little House.  Later in the trip, Tina also read me a story by our favorite author, Kate DeCamillo.  I'd read The Tale of Despereaux to Tina on a trip down to NC a couple of years ago, so she read The Tiger Rising to me on this trip (both read-alouds that we'd shared with our respective classrooms over the years).  Perhaps I was overly open to emotion, but both books Tina read brought tears to my eyes.

     Towards the end of the day, north of Columbus, we were ready to get back home and hoping against hope that Esme would sleep for the duration of the trip.  Neither of us believed in that possibility, as her last feeding had been in southern Ohio -- if she made it all the way home, it would be well over four hours between feedings, and like I mentioned earlier, we'd never seen that before.  Amazingly, she did make it literally all the way until we turned onto our street before she started crying -- and we probably would have made it all the way home if I hadn't stopped for gas (but driving for over 30 miles with the low fuel light on when we were so close to home didn't seem like the best plan -- I was having flashbacks to a family trip I'd been on as a child when we ran out of gas within sight of our exit from the interstate after a 12 hour drive).
     So now Esme has been in five states:  Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina.  Pretty good for a five week old.  If she keeps this pace up, she'll have covered the whole country before she's two.  (Ed. note:  not gonna happen!)


     Super deluxe bonus:  when we got home, there was a frost forecast, so I was able to head out to the garden and harvest a bounty.  In late October in Michigan I harvested carrots, two kinds of tomatoes, two kinds of very spicy peppers, arugula, kale, mustard greens, green onions, and a pumpkin (but you'll see that in a later post...).