When you are in the car for some 30 hours, you think of lots of good Blog fodder. So I declare this week to be my Week of Review. I’m going to review my paperchase experience and recap what I would have done different and will do differently should we adopt again in the future. I’ll recap my travel experience in the same way. And then I’ll recap the last 7 months of Addy’s life and our adjustment as a family.

But first, a review of my weekend!

Thursday: We drove. And drove. The kids did really well. Right around Memphis or so Noah fell asleep. He CAN NOT sleep in the car, he has constant night terrors, every half hour like clockwork. so sleep in the car is not a welcome sight. It was HORRIBLE. So we knew it would not be a great next few hours. Then Addison gagged and threw up all over her car seat. Thankfully the commotion of stopping and cleaning out the car seat, etc was enough to wake up Noah until we got to our hotel. We made it to Nashville by around 1am and pass out.

Friday: We drove six hours to Columbus and checked into our hotel. It’s the same hotel we stay in every time in Columbus, the Woodfin, so it feels like “home” to us. We settled in, took a nap, shower (ahhh, a shower!) and got ready for our big Blogger dinner.

A lot of people asked how the kids did in the car and how the drive was. The kids kept themselves entertained mostly by way of DVDs and video games and snacks, I’m sorry to say. All those cool travel games went out the window. But I’m so not picky. I quickly realized that the answer to a happy cross-country road trip with 4 kids is to say yes whenever plausible even if it is far out of the norm of what we’d usually allow. So the kids got to eat non-stop even though usually we do a pretty structured 3 meals/1 snack day. Addison was my main concern as she is at that really awkward stage for travel. She’s fully mobile and needs to exercise her legs a lot and really hates the carseat. But she’s too little for toys or activities that really consume a lot of time. I bought her a portable DVD player for the trip becuase her car seat is rear-facing and she can’t see the built-in DVD player in our minivan. She doesn’t watch tv at home so I had no idea if it would help. I bought a Baby Einstein DVD becuase it seems like other people’s babies really like these. Thankfully this was a huge hit. She fell asleep watching it several times and it entertained her when she was just bored with everyone else many other times.

The Dinner: We ate at HaLong Bay in Polaris which is the first Vietnamese restaurant we ever ate at, last year during Asian Festival. I was so excited to finally get to meet everyone - Jenn, LawMommy, E., Nicole & Melissa and everyone’s families. Jenn pointed out that all of us had biological children and adopted children which gave us a unique connection. I also realized that 4 out of the 6 of us are homeschoolers. The food was great, as usual, but I was totally in it for My People and not for the food. I think, as fun as it was, that next time we all need to meet at a park instead. The kids wanted to play, the parents wanted to talk and the food took too much time away from my selfish needs to talk to these wonderful people as much as the few hours we had together would allow. I wish I had spent more time talking to E. and Jenn becuase I didn’t realize I wouldn’t see either of them the rest of the weekend. But I can honestly say if all I did all weekend was drive up for that dinner, it was totally worth it for me.

Saturday:
The Asian Festival: Saturday was the Asian Festival which is a HUGE event down by the college in Columbus. For the second year in a row it was SUPER hot, but this year it was a bit overcast for most of the day and occasionally there was a light breeze so it wasn’t so bad. I got to spend lots of time with both Nicole and Melissa and their families and later met a few other adoptive parents briefly. We hung out for awhile near our agency’s booth, visiting our facilitator’s wife who was in town for the event along with her kids. We let the kids run around on the grass (remember, this was one of my goals!) and get sleepy.
Then we split up and went out separate ways so I could search for Squeaky shoes, to no avail! We bought some really cool things this year including a hand-painted picture of three Buddhist monks that is for Addison’s nursery and a cool Om pendant that I bought for myself but Addison stole and wore the rest of the weekend. I wish I had bought a few more necklaces for both of us. I had hoped to find silk lanterns for Addison’s nursery as well but the only booth I found that sold them were really hideous colors.

Saturday Night: We called it a day around dinner time and left the festival, hit up Baja Fresh (which we love but don’t have in Houston) and jetted on over to my good friend Heather’s house. She and I have known each other since before our 5 year olds were born. She lived in Michigan for awhile and then moved and moved again, finally settling in Columbus. Our kids are all close in age and buddies too. We hung out and had some wine and let the kids play until bedtime where she graciously took possession of my two oldest boys for the night, leaving us with the two littles and a long full night’s sleep.

Sunday: More visiting with Heather and family and then on to the zoo for our agency’s annual picnic. On the way back to our agency’s pavilion we ran into LawMommy and her family and later met up with Nicole. Our awesome husbands took the kids to do “zoo things” and gave us a few minutes of uninterrupted chat time which I realize is what I was really after this weekend. Addison is too little to get anything out of the festival or activities, my boys enjoyed it but it is really ME who was after the connection to these families I have grown to love online and finally got to meet. I could have stayed and chatted all day but, blah, we had to go on.

By the time we got to our agency picnic it was basically over. They had already done the talk, the family photo (I guess), the food, etc. But that’s OK because it was totally lame. The only people who showed up to the picnic were the ones I had hung out with over the weekend anyway along with Sarah who just got back from Vietnam and who I was dying to meet. If Sarah was not there, it would have been a total waste of time for me. There was only one PAP present, that i was aware of, so I tried to talk to him a little. And otherwise, it was just a bunch of people who had adopted through another agency entirely before the shutdown. They are all really close so it was just as weird as last year for us - it felt like crashing someone else’s party. At least this year we knew a few agency families but I wonder why more of the agency’s APs didn’t come? Is it that APs just don’t think these kind of events are worth the effort? Or that it is too far? Or on a holiday weekend? Or too soon after returning with their kids? Or that they had such a bad experience up until travel that they don’t want to hike it all the way back to hang out with the agency staff? I would have loved to meet lots of recently returned APs. Maybe next year.

So we walked around the zoo a little. We love the Columbus zoo but it was hot and I was tired and to be honest I had sort of checked off all the things I had wanted to accomplish over the weekend (meet cool blogger friends, run through grass, avoid the rain, fail to get squeaky shoes, go to agency picnic) and was ready to start making progress on our journey home. The kids had some bizarre need to see the okapi, of all things, which of course was at the entirely back end of the zoo on the end of a long African animals path. Thankfully I had stayed back on a bench with Addison to hang out and let her play a little before sticking her back in the car. Eventually the kids saw the okapi (hope it was everything they hoped for!) and we met back up with Melissa and we both hit the road for home.

The drive home:

Sunday: We drove forEVER on Sunday night. There was rain so hard I had to pull off the road, there was dark, there was constant complaints from Noah that his butt hurt from sitting (and I’m thinking “we’ve only been on the road 2 hours - we are in BIG trouble”). Finally after driving for 8 hours we only made it like an hour north of Nashville. I have no idea why it took so long but it was miserable. We all collapsed in our hotel bed and slept hard.

Monday: We didn’t get back on the road until 8:30am because we just needed more sleep. But then Monday’s long drive was much better. no complaints, the rain wasn’t the cats-and-dogs variety (although I think there were several hours of rain we had to drive through down south), my car’s GPS took us a new way home which was….exciting So we got to go through some new states. And then the highlight (not) was when I was driving and we were in Baton Rouge and suddenly we were on some stretch of highway (I-10, in case you are taking notes) that was actually a raised bridge, two lanes wide, that went on forever. FOR-E-VER, people. And it was getting dark. And raining. And I’m a nervous driver in both of those conditions but I’m also afraid of heights and I used to be petrified of bridges but they don’t bug me much anymore but this one just did me in. I had huge semis riding my tail for a billion miles because they could only use the right lane but I was going too slow to go in the left lane plus I wasn’t about to switch lanes IN THE RAIN becuase I knew my car would slide and go off the bridge, right? There was no rest stops, no off ramps, nothing. Just miles and miles of bridge culminating in some super super high narrow no-shoulder bridge over a huge body of water that about did me in. One of my goals in the near future is to take the kids to New Orleans and see some of the damage still present from the hurricane but now I’m thinking I can’t do that portion of the drive again. Or at least not unless it is dry and daytime. Because that was one long scary bridge. Other than that, there was no drama. The kids did great, I made the realization that the video games weren’t so bad because the kids spent a fair amount of time playing “head to head” games not so different than the travel games I had wanted them to play anyway - just a little more 21st century I guess. And then they discovered the Silly Putty and we had to actually stop and get a few more ‘eggs’ because they spent literally hours upon hours making things out of Silly Putty, such a “Boy peeing in toilet” and “Hubby with a life-sized nose”. Great fun can be had with Silly Putty. So then I felt better about all that technology rotting their brains for hours on end. We got home at 11:30pm and dropped into our beds and that was that.

Although it was a lot of driving, we really had a great time. The weather was beautiful, the people were even more beautiful, the kids had a fun time, the car drive was even fun. Sometimes too fun. There were a bunch of times that the kids or Tony made me laugh so hard that I was crying and afraid I’d crash the car! I love my family Glad to be home but I’ll definitely do it again next year.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Adoption, Holidays & Vacations, Photos & Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.