Was it heaven? Nope, just Iowa

So I fell off the face of the earth last week, but it wasn’t because I was drowning in work. OK, I did have a lot of work, but I also celebrated Clementine’s recent success on our trip to Washington, D.C. by taking her on yet another family pilgrimage to Des Moines. Since tickets to fly there are bizarrely expensive (seriously, who wants to go there for fun?), we decided to drive. Since Clementine still hates the car (and I think it’s cruel to put a little kid in the car for 10 daytime hours), we decided to drive through the night like old times. Since we have been blessed with the happiest baby on earth of late, it was surprisingly easy.

Nate and I are huge road trippers, and since we spent many years after college together and in love but living states apart, we are all too familiar with late nights on the open road with only the destination in mind. It did seem like a cruel slap in the face when we had a child who hated the car—kind of the ultimate test of our ability to be parents—but we’ve coped well, and I think the driving all night solution worked for the most part. I have to qualify that, however, because my normally easy-going husband is becoming increasingly type A, uptight and inflexible, and we had a little demonstration of that when we arrived at out hotel at 3:30 a.m. only to be told that they hadn’t kept a room for us. There was some big sports festival at Drake University, and there was no room at the inn. Any inn.

To me this seemed like no big deal. We have traveled all over the country and the world together, and we’ve certainly dealt with worse. We’ve slept in train stations and airports, we’ve missed planes (OK, that was all me), we’ve gotten terribly lost and had all sorts of unpredictable shit happen to us in strange places, and we’ve ALWAYS survived. If ever there was one of us who dealt with these unpredictable situations poorly, it was you-know-who (hint: not Nate). But this whole parenting thing has altered my temperament in some serious ways, and it seemed clear to me that while this SUCKED, there was an easy solution that didn’t involve waking up his grandparents who didn’t even have a couch for us to crash on anyway. Clementine was fast asleep in her car seat, so why not head back to the lovely, clean and inviting rest stop a few miles back, lean our seats back to catch some Zs and make an appearance at a more acceptable time? While this is eventually what we did, it was not before a bit of a temper tantrum and a lot of fuming. Even when we were happily snuggled in our car and I was feeling a bit of the adventurousness I thought was lost when we had a child, Nate couldn’t let it go. He was so steamed about it, I couldn't even sleep. I was going to avail myself of the free internet in the rest area (seriously, did I mention the place was LOVELY. I know it sounds odd, but the great state of Iowa has got it going on in the rest area department) to blog about what a jerk he was being, but I had let my computer battery run out and forgotten the plug like an asshole (thus none of the blogging and catching up I had planned to do from the hotel Saturday night while C. was sleeping and Nate was visiting with his family).

I mention all of this not as a passive aggressive attack on Nate. Of course it sucked that the hotel forgot about us, and he was right to feel mad. I’m getting worried, though, because he has been more and more upset about little things lately, and I miss my easy-going, calming best friend. I feel like we’ve switched roles completely: he gets ramped up about every little thing, and I am the one asking if it really matters. Last night, for example, he spent a better portion of the evening pissed because the new CD player is broken. He was hopping mad because the shit you can buy these days is just cheap and no good and he used to have a CD player that worked for 20 years because it was made when quality mattered and the whole world is against him and life sucks because the CD player should just work. Seriously, I need to find a way to help him find his way back to himself because he can’t be feeling too happy all angry and tense like this. Then again, maybe it will blow over; things are getting easier as Clementine grows up. Also, family can be very stressful, and I tend to become a bit of a freak when I go to my mom’s as well.

Other than the drama of arrival, we had a nice visit with Nate’s family. Clementine rose to the occasion and was sweet as a peach, even if she was just a little mama-hungry and clingy from time-to-time. She was teething and a little cranky (and Nate’s grandma was apparently channeling my mother the activity director for a bit and devised a grand plan to separate me from Nate and the baby for an afternoon so the baby could be schlepped all over the city to meet heaven-knows-who, which didn’t help matters), but who can resist her ready smile and cute little quirks? She’s making kissy noises, makes this funny little scheming hand gesture (I have some pics of that to post) and is trying her damndest to stand on her own. I was glad she got to meet her great-grandparents and see her grandpa again, and she loved Nate’s cousins. I got to go to a fabulous vintage clothing shop, but I didn’t get my Paul Revere’s breadsticks as I hoped. They are my nostalgia food—I practically lived on them in college.

We trekked home all night Saturday and managed to eek some pleasure out of yesterday after catching up on our sleep. We did yard work mostly while Clementine supervised from her pack-n-play. We also tried to enjoy a little picnic outside, which just about impossible due all the neighborhood dogs. I don’t know why I haven’t said much about the joy that it is living among the racist Nascar fans that make up my soon-to-be-transitioning (I hope) neighborhood because they are always good for a laugh. The dog thing is no laughing matter, though, because EVERYONE has some sort of big, scary dog that was purchased for a sense of security but ultimately relegated to bark outisde in protest (I believe) of the ill treatment they receive. No one walks the dogs or trains them—it is just a novelty that wears off quickly and leaves behind a pile of shit that no one wants to clean up.

Now I’m back to work and trying to get a whole lotta done. That’s especially hard after a weekend with my girl because I can’t help wondering what she’s up to. We have a ton to do this week in anticipation of our annual Derby party on Saturday. Last year was rough because I couldn’t have any mint juleps; this year will be a new kind of tough with a kid under foot. My my my.