Summer respite

Although it's the definition of "respite" is "a short period of rest or relief from something difficult or unpleasant", living in Ohio isn't entirely unpleasant.  But living away from family is the unpleasant part and we are definitely taking a respite from that!

Before we get into details about how we are and the travel was, I just had to throw this photo in.  Fish is in blue and Finn is in pink.  Do you think that they could be twins?

As you may have noticed from the previous post, we have safely made it to Iowa.  The trip was fairly uneventful.  The kids traveled as well as expected when traveling alone with a toddler and an infant during the middle of the day.  My initial intent was to leave around 2am on Saturday morning.  I traveled at this time on my way back from Iowa in April.  It worked out spectacularly.  The kids slept until about 6am and then napped for most of the rest of the way with a couple crying/screaming spells.  But with E gone the entire week before, I didn't get much sleep.  And when the alarm went off at 2am to get up, I just couldn't drag myself out of bed. 

So we ended up pulling out of the driveway at 8am, after finishing packing up the last minute thing and having a full breakfast.  We pulled into my parents' driveway at about 5pm and so our trip lasted 10 hours.  And we drove through the entire day.  Finn was pretty good the entire way.  The only bump in the road with her was when we stopped at a McDonald's for lunch. They had a play area which was too big for her to play on and it was really difficult trying to get her to leave with us (as I'm carrying a heavy infant car seat and a huge diaper bag that has to weigh at least 20 pounds).  I eventually coaxed her to the exit and then to the car.  Fish was good the entire way until we had about 125 miles left (of the 600 mile drive).  By that point, he was over the car seat.  I had changed him and fed him and he was still screaming.  So I pulled out a last resort.

I left his canopy of his car seat up.  The sun was a later-day golden sun (which I didn't think was sun-burn bright) and it was hitting on his face.  It forced him to close his eyes and after about 10 minutes, he was sleeping.  Then I asked Finn to pull the canopy down so the sun wasn't hitting his face.  He slept the rest of the way.

We are really enjoying our time here at my home away from home.  And I'm taking plenty of photos for upcoming posts.  We have played with cousins (a lot).  We had another cousin born.  We had our first parade and our first fireworks.  We still have more things planned like seeing a couple cousins racing dirt bikes/quads, our first county fair and our first trip to a horse farm.