Great Grandma Pearl
We just took our second trip with Jack, up to Washington state. We flew to Seattle last Friday and met up with my parents and sister’s family, who had flown up the day before. We did not have a seat this time for Jack, and even though it was only two hours, in some ways the flight was more difficult than the one we took to England. He’s just waaaaay more fidgety now and it takes a lot more effort to keep him occupied. I had a window seat (I can’t remember the last time I had a window seat!) and he loved looking out the window, and having the window shade moved up and down. He also played peek-a-boo with the people in the seat behind us, who had a 1-year-old of their own and were very nice.
When we got to the hotel Friday night I started feeling sick… headache & nausea… so Chris took over and I went to bed right after Jack did. It was a suite, so we had a bedroom with a door. Jack slept in the crib in the bedroom. Luckily I felt better by morning. No idea what that was about!
Saturday we went to visit Ruth, my step-grandmother, at her assisted living place, and had a nice lunch with her. Saturday night we went to my second cousin’s wedding. Chris took Jack into the “crying room” at the back of the church for most of the ceremony. It was a great little room with a glass window and lots of toys.
After the ceremony, we went back to the hotel and fed Jack and put him to bed. We hired a professional babysitter, and she stayed there while we went to the wedding reception. It worked out great. We got to the reception just in time to get food from the buffet before it was cleared off for the dance floor, and danced all night. We stayed until 11:00 when the wedding ended. The babysitter said Jack didn’t make a peep.
Sunday we went to brunch at my Aunt Chris’s house. She’s 91 but didn’t seem phased by having 20 people over! After brunch, Chris headed to the airport, and Cindy and family went off to do more sightseeing. My parents, Jack and I drove across the mountains (it was snowing) to Eastern Washington to see my dad’s mother, who is 95.
The original plan was just to visit and have her meet Jack (who is named after my grandfather, who died when I was 12) but then she fell and got sick and was in a nursing home. So we had a new mission, which was to move her into an assisted living facility in town, in 2.5 days! Luckily we had a lot of help from her friends.
It was kind of a stressful visit for my parents, getting her settled in. Grandma was pretty unhappy with the idea of moving to this place (a few years ago, when she moved from her house into a duplex, said that she would rather die than move there) but when she arrived and saw all her furniture and treasured things in place, she was much happier about it. I don’t think she’ll miss her duplex after all.
I didn’t spend as much time as I would have liked with her, but we were so busy going between the nursing home, the hotel, the new place, and the duplex it just didn’t work out. Still, we saw her every day and she was thrilled to see Jack. I’m so glad she met him.
It was an adventure for Jack in that we didn’t bring his food everywhere, but sometimes ordered off the menu at restaurants. There were very few restaurants (it’s a small farming town) but he tried a veggie quesadilla and spinach Gorgonzola ravioli among other things. He had a hard time adjusting to the hotel cribs (and let me just complain for a minute about how HARD it is to get a crib.. 3/4 hotels we’ve stayed at didn’t have the crib in our room when we arrived, despite asking for one at the time of reservation AND calling ahead to remind them AND them saying when we checked it it would be there).
But he really rolled with it for the most part. He napped ON THE FLOOR at my grandma’s duplex (unheard of for him), went to bed late every night, ate at weird times, was hauled all around, met lots of new people, and generally was very good.
On the flight home, they let me bring the car seat on board even though we didn’t have a seat for him because they had a lot of empty seats. I had an aisle seat and the check-in agent told me to put it in the center seat. Well, RIGHT before we took off (as we’re taxiing and the flight attendants are doing their final check) a flight attendant comes by and says, “You can’t have that seat there.” Apparently there is a rule that it must be in the window seat so it won’t block that person in an emergency. It was too late for me to change seats and he took it away and said we could take care of it later. I was like, can’t you just install it in the window seat behind me? And he’s like, no, no, I can’t, I don’t know how to do that, and then the guy sitting right behind me just GRABBED it from him and quickly installed it in his window seat. Ha!
Anyway, he fell asleep on me for the first 45 minutes (!!) and I didn’t bother moving later. In turns out my mom was seated two rows behind me and had THREE seats, so we could have sat there the whole time. Boo.
It was a long trip, but the wedding was lots of fun and I’m so glad we saw so many people from my family. One of my other second cousins (the bride’s 1st cousin) was matron of honor, and gave birth a month early: two days before the wedding. She still came to the wedding to fulfill her duties! I was in awe.
Jack has started learning to walk. He started last week, taking a couple of steps and falling into me, and is practicing every day. He’s going to be 1 next Friday and I can hardly believe it.
