Random acts of ....vomiting

After years of driving my 4 speed tin can from ATL to STL to visit Sara and her family, and then years of driving back to NH to visit with them, it is finally time for some payback.  Sara always had the best excuse that she lived close to our parents as well as the fact that she had kids.  Well, the bar has been evened out now that I have two kids, so I pretty much annoyed the hell out of her until she agreed to come to visit.

Not to say that she came against her will or anything.  But it was a big deal to me.  And the kids.  Ethan and Cassam were super excited to see Zack; Ethan because Zack has now doubled the amount of male cousins in the pool and Cassam because she wants to emulate everything that Ethan does.  And the two of them could not have loved or doted on this baby any more.  It was great.  I didn't have to do a thing the whole weekend!  Delilah and Ellie were happy to play with each other too, often crawling around on all fours pretending to be dogs or cats.  They also had an amazing capacity to unload all of Ellie's toys, markers etc all over the place in a mere matter of seconds.  It doesn't bother me in the least, but you could see Mike just twitching over the mess.  He had to clean it up all the time too because it was driving him crazy.  Really funny to watch.

 The weekend went by too fast and Sara wanted to kill me for not telling her that I was on call.  Which in most circumstances wouldn't be a problem, except of course when I had a good reason to not want to have to go into the hospital.  I had to call her on Friday morning to tell her Ellie had had a "random act of vomiting" that morning, which almost derailed her by a whole day.  When she was halfway there I had to do an emergency surgery on a newborn, but still convinced her to stay on track.  In the midst of all this it was also reported that Zack had a "random act of vomiting" but I managed to keep that at bay until she got here.  I was only an hour late and to my knowledge, no one in her household has gotten sick. 

We hung out and went to the Zoo as well.  The weather was fantastic and we were able to maximize our usage of the backyard, something that hasn't quite happened much this spring yet.  I still can't quite look straight at my nephew, who is now a young man, and not think of how it just seems like yesterday that he was the cutest little boy you had ever seen.  I mean, he's handsome now, but soooooo hard to look at him like an adult.  I got to take Cassie on a shopping excursion for her birthday which was fun, although I sort of felt like my grandmother so that wasn't that cool.  And Sara and I even got in some good quality sister talking time. Oh, and there was one more middle of the night emergency surgery.  Never fails.

Hopefully she will come back with the kids again...

Delilah in the princess castle, pretty much swimming in toys

Cassam and Ethan, I mean Zack.  For some reason I call every little boy Ethan.  Even my own son.  Ethan was the first baby boy!

Ethan and Zack