Let’s talk about our trip to Indiana.

Do I really want to? Because I’m kind of worn out by it, truth be known. Here’s a list of highlights:

Birdy. Always a highlight. Finally big enough to be funny and roll around on the floor with some toys by herself for a minute, not that the first grandchild ever spends a minute by herself. But I swear to you, she is like that frog in the box in that old cartoon—one minute she’s all “Hello, my baby” with the clapping, but if you ever say “clap for Grandpa, yaaaaay!” all you get is a drooly “ribbit.” She’s tricky and sly and made of warm biscuits.

She is also apparently frightened of the sound of a flushing toilet, which I learned while changing a diaper at a rest stop. I attribute this episode to the fact that she was not fully awake, still dazed from the moving car, when she was laid down and disrobed and heard the rest-stop strength woosh of the toilet. Screamingredfacedtearsreachinggrabbing-- I dressed her faster than I ever have (flinging a poo onto the floor in the process), and picked her up--she hugged my neck so tightly, gasping to calm herself down, like she’d been saved at the last minute from a charging bear or a burning building. And I have never felt so much like a mom. I’m sure I’ve said it before and I will no doubt say it again: This mama-love is a fierce, fierce thing that takes my breath away like I’ve been punched in the chest.

The Monon Trail. It’s an old railroad track that runs all over the city, made into a paved greenway. Bird and I had a beautiful and peaceful walk on it, saw every different kind of person, and I made the skeleton of a skeleton of a skeleton of a plan to talk to Andy about maybe possibly moving home to Indy someday. Depending on your weather tolerance, Indiana can have some crappy weather extremes: hot hots and cold colds. But unlike the south, where we fast forward through spring like it’s just a commercial, Indiana has an intoxicating spring that will make you make Indiana plans against your better judgment.

Sitting in the kitchen at my in-laws’, surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins at dusk eating birthday cake and laughing. Again, springtime in Indiana is a haze of ideal-ness, wherein you easily picture your little family chasing fireflies around the yard and then cozying up wrapped in blankets on the porch swing, falling asleep while you clink glasses with your internal self and say “Things will be so perfect.”

Conversation with A’s grandmother that started to be about that crazy bat, Tom Cruise:
Me: Yeah, Scientology is pretty “out there”
Mamaw: I just heard on the news somewhere that some folks think people might’ve decended from apes!
Me: Yep!
Mamaw: Like we might have just stood straight up over time!
Me: Yep!
Mamaw: Well, I guess everybody’s gonna to believe what they’re gonna believe!
Me: Yep!

Unbearable, forced cuddling on Bird. This leaves the mama lion angry and feeling helpless.

The ease of A. and his brother and his dad all together around the fire pit. A. breaking his birthday golf club on the first swing and trying, giggling, to hide it from his dad. He turns thirty next week.

Green Bean Casserole. I am making rock n’ roll goat horns with my hands and shoving them in your face right now. That is how much this stuff freaking rocks.

Disappearing clothing. A’s mom is such a mom-mom that every time you are not physically in the guest room, she enters and harvests whatever clothes she thinks are dirty in order to launder them, eventually kidnapping all of your clothes at one time in her zealous laundry gathering, including your husband’s clothes and your child’s clothes, and you will at some point get out of the shower and realize you have no pants anywhere to be found and your family is practically naked.

$190 speeding ticket on the way home. Thanks, Kentucky State PD! (in A’s defense, the actual ticket was only $60, but the court costs are outrageous. He wasn’t bulleting along the highway recklessly, promise.)

Literally falling asleep at a stoplight this morning on the way to daycare, luckily next to a big dump truck that woke me when it grumbled forward at the green. These trips are exhausting, and we return to a house that we left in a mad rush, spoiled food, grouchy dogs, nothing in its place (if it ever had a place… we try our best). It’s looking like an early night for mama snee.