July 14-21

This past week, we took a vacation to Traverse City with my family to celebrate my parents' 30th wedding anniversary.  Allow me to chronicle our adventures for you.

First, the trip up to my parents' house.  It was largely uneventful, but I must note that I made Olivia a fabulous quiet book (details next week) for her to use in the car.  That's only important because it comes up later.

Saturday morning, Jacob and I went running and learned that Jacob is an old man.  He made it, though.  :)  After mass, Justine and I took the girls to Aldi to grab a few things (like 10 boxes of cereal) and then returned home to make squeezy pouches for the babies to eat during the week.  Mom and the kids packed, and by 2:00 mom, Jacob, Jillian, James, the girls, and I were on our way.  After I set off towards I-75, I got a phone call informing me that the route I was taking didn't have a northbound entrance ramp.  I turned around and managed to rejoin Jacob a short time later, arriving at the entrance ramp only two cars behind.  By the time I actually got ON 75, however, Jacob was nowhere to be seen.  Meanwhile, my GPS (code name: Tango) was trying to take us off at the first exit; it seemed he wanted to go sightseeing at The Henry Ford.  I called mom, and confirmed that I was indeed supposed to be on 75 for quite some time.

Sunday we went to church, and we turned on Tango to make sure we were headed the right direction.  It's a good thing we turned him on, because we'd accidentally overshot our first turn.  We were berating his directional choices (he's been having a midlife crisis (see the above paragraph), so the suspicion wasn't entirely unwarranted on our part) when he dumped us back on the road we should have been on all along.  Apologies were made.  We arrived at church, participated in the entirely English service (in a Greek church, no less!), stopped at a local store for lunch supplies, and allowed Tango to lead us home.  Everything was going well until I missed a turn.  As punishment, Tango had me make a sharp left and took us down a well-packed dirt road.  We reached the main road again, and resumed previous conversations.  Then I passed another turn.  Having learned my lesson the first time, I turned around in a driveway before I could be chastised.  It did no good.  Our next turn was a smaller, hillier dirt road that we're pretty sure led directly through a jungle.  We bumped along, hoping that no cars would come from the other direction and force us to back up all the way to the main road to let them pass.  Finally we made it onto our road, and our destination (according to Tango) was... a patch of trees.  Luckily, mom knew what to look for (little green men with orange flags), and we spotted our actual destination about a quarter of a mile down the road.

On Monday afternoon, we made a meal plan and shopping list, all the while wondering why we hadn't done that before we left.  Mom, Gretchen, and I took it upon ourselves to go grocery shopping, and we ended up at Meijer after hearing from people at one of the higher-priced local stores that one existed in Traverse City.  Mom and I were disappointed that we couldn't find something even cheaper, like Aldi, but decided that Meijer wouldn't be too bad.  As mom went through the checkout two hours later, I went to the car to feed Gretchen.  Through the open window, I heard a woman say to her friend, "You sound like you'd like that new Aldi place."  Such sadness.  :(  Well, now we know for next time.

Olivia spent much of her time at the cabin under the impression that "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine, too," so she hurried around the house protecting all the toys (even William's) from William.  She would patiently shove William's three acknowledged belongings -- his pacifier, his blanket, and his sippy cup -- in his face while blocking the way to all other items.  Fortunately, William was less interested in material goods than in experiences, so he happily crawled around, exploring the ramp, the stairs, and the ability of his cousin to be a useful thing to pull himself up on.  Olivia, to her credit, stood very still during the latter explorations, although she did have a rather confused and disdainful look upon her face.  In not-William-related impressions, Olivia thought the water was great.  In excellent proud daughter fashion, she decided that all watercraft of any sort (including the giant trampoline) were "daddy's boat."  She also enjoyed looking for rocks with Aunt Jillian (and piling them everywhere -- on the bench, in her lawn chair's cup holder, against the gate inside the house...), tossing her doll down the playground slide (but not going down herself), subsisting solely on graham crackers, and seeing if she could get out the screen door and onto the back porch without anyone noticing.

Gretchen's reactions were less obvious than Olivia's.  She pretty much behaved like she always does.  William found her especially interesting, but is still working on the concept of "gentle," so whoever was holding her had to keep an eye (and a hand) out for William.  To add to his interest, Gretchen's pacifier matched one of the ones that William brought, so he thought maybe it was his and tried to take it a couple of times.

The boys were all in tournament mode, so they set up a shuffleboard tournament and a euchre tournament.  My shuffleboarding got off to a shaky start as I lost to dad in about a minute and a half, but I improved enough to make it to the bronze medal match.  Unfortunately, although I had a much better showing (again against dad), I lost and had to settle for fourth place.  I believe Bryan got second after losing a hard-fought match against Josef.  Euchre went better for me as Jacque and I took the title, beating out "Team Apathy" (my mom and Joseph) in the most relaxed championship game anyone has ever seen.

Wednesday was Dunesday, which was perhaps a poor decision as there was a heat advisory (and a "tropical" dewpoint) that day.  The weathermen promised storms the rest of the week, though, so it was Wednesday or not at all.  We ended up going in two groups since my girls decided to sleep late that morning.  It worked out well because we needed to take two vans anyway, so the big people took off while Justine, mom, James, the babies, and I left a little later in the baby bus.  When we arrived, the woman in the booth warned us about the heat advisory and told us to make sure we wore shoes (so our feet wouldn't blister) and carry lots of water ("lots" being defined as "at least 2 liters per person").  We found out later that the same warning had not been given to the first group, so they went trekking to Lake Michigan with three and a half bottles of water and two pairs of shoes between the seven of them.  The baby bussers climbed about a quarter of the way up the big dune at the entrance and then wandered down a bike path before coming back to sit at a table and eat apples while waiting for the more adventurous types to return.  James made several trips up and down the dune just for fun while Olivia zealously protected her sippy cup from William's eager grasps.  Being only almost two and not yet in possession of all her logical brain cells (we hope), she failed to realize that William's reach was a good six inches shorter than hers and that she could easily thwart him by leaving the cup up on the table.  Her solution was instead to get it down off the table and hug it against herself, putting it within easy reach of William.  We finally saw the first group bounding down the final dune ("bounding" is not an exaggeration; Josef looked like a gazelle), accompanied by Jacob's yells of "hot, hot, hot!"  James decided to join them in their frantic race to the bottom, and ended up landing face first in the sand, much to the amusement of those watching.  Meanwhile, dad and Joseph, the owners of the aforementioned two pairs of shoes, picked their leisurely way down the slope to join the rest of us at the bottom so that we could regroup and go back to the cabin.

Friday was the trip to the beach, mostly so that Jacque could stick her toes in Lake Michigan.  We went to Grand Traverse Bay, and Jacque decided that was good enough.  The water was cold, but Olivia didn't care.  She was all set to march right in, until she noticed that her feet had an unfortunate habit of disappearing beneath the sand.  After this minor setback, she waded happily for a while and then wandered up into the sand to play with William.  We had a picnic lunch, changed the clothes of the wet and sandy babies, and the baby bus went home.  The other group went shopping, and Bryan came home with souvenirs: a snow globe for Gretchen, a rock (what else?) for Olivia, a t-shirt for me (because I keep losing mine to Gretchen's spit), and a lighthouse shaped bottle opener for himself.  Lest you think Bryan completely forgot himself, Olivia's rock was a Petosky stone, not just some random rock off the street.  :)

Saturday we all headed back to my parents' house.  Olivia decided to make the trip more exciting by making herself so mad (about riding in our car instead of my mom's car, we think) that she threw up.  What a good way to start the drive.  Other than that, the trip was uneventful.  We stayed with my parents overnight and headed home the next day at naptime.

As we drove the final leg of our trip home (the hour from Bryan's parents' house to ours), Olivia finally snapped.  She'd been doing okay in the car up until that point, but somewhere in the hours of car seat naps, she finally lost it.  She wasn't bad, just incredibly obnoxious.  Let me set the scene.  In the driver's seat (for the first time all week), Bryan.  In the passenger seat, Johannah, holding a giant zucchini, compliments of my mother-in-law.  In the back, a tired Olivia, holding her quiet book and two plastic stacking rings, and a sleeping Gretchen.  Action.  Olivia dropped her rings on the floor and began chanting "rings, please! rings, please!" over and over.  At least she's polite.  I picked them up and handed them back, whereupon she immediately threw them down again.  I picked up one, but could not reach the other.  The chant changed to "more rings! more rings!"  I explained that I couldn't reach the other ring ("daddy more rings!"), that daddy was driving and therefore couldn't be called upon to retrieve rings, and that I only pick up deliberately thrown toys once anyway, so she got a one ring bonus.  Raise your hand if you've ever successfully used a logical explanation on a two-year-old.  Me either.  To distract her from the rings, I had her open her book.  She found a cat and changed her tune.  "Meow.  Meow.  Meowmeow.  Meowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeow meowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeowmeow!"  After two minutes of "meow"s, we turned the page.  One of Olivia's favorite pages is the fishing page; she likes the octopus.  She dug said octopus out of its pocket and shouted "octopus! Mommy octopus!"  I dutifully took the octopus and put it on my lap.  "No octopus down!  Mommy octopus!"  I picked the octopus up and said, "I'm going to put it right here next to the zucchini."  "Zucchini!  Octopus!"  Then followed the most fabulous conversation of the whole trip.  Olivia would yell "Octopus!" and I would yell "Octopus!" back, holding up the octopus.  Then "Zucchini!"  "Zucchini!".  "Octopus! (octopus!) Zucchini! (zucchini!)..."  Bryan started laughing and said he wished he could record this so that whenever I was having a bad day he could just show me the clip of myself holding an octopus in one hand and a zucchini in the other while shouting back and forth with my toddler.  Octopus zucchini, indeed.

It should be noted that "octopus zucchini" sounds more like "ow-puss na-nini" when Olivia says it.  Also "more" is "mo'" and "please" is "pee."

Oh, we DID finally make it home.  :)

Pictures:

Olivia and Daddy put their toes in Lake Michigan:

Justine and I thought the double grocery cart was cool.  Olivia used the second seat for her bear:

Jillian thought it was cute that Olivia took a nap with her hand stuck in her sock, so she took a picture:

Daddy's boat:

Hanging out at the lake:

Gretchen and Oma:

Cousins:

Olivia's model pictures:

Bryan plays ping pong:

Johannah was there, too:

One more of Bryan: