Randomness

We’ve been traveling lately so our lives have felt very random.  When all is said and done, I think Gabe and I will have spent 25 nights away from home over a 6-week timespan.  For Tahd it will be even more.  As such, this is a random post reflecting the craziness and randomness of our life right now – the craziness and randomness that I’m trying really hard to enjoy and seize!

1.  Gabe is not a great eater. This poses issues when we go away.  If left to his own devices, he would eat chicken fingers and french fries at every meal – lunch and dinner at least.  For breakfast it would be waffles.  Delish, no?  Since we’re going to be gone so much, I decided I could not tolerate weeks on end of fried foods, so we’d need to find a way to eat some fresh foods periodically.  Enter Ruby Tuesday, the restaurant that has my most favorite salad bar.  It is chock full of delicious, colorful produce, fruits, and other assorted goodies.  I connived and pleaded and insisted, and by Friday I had Gabe convinced to order the salad bar as his lunch.  Best part? He thought it was his idea.  Here’s Gabe with his first restaurant salad.  He made it himself, with a fair amount of “please-hold-the-plate-with-both-hands!!!” pleading on my part.

2.  To prevent our week from being a total dud, Gabe and I decided to go to a movie.  We saw Toy Story 3.  I’ve heard lots of good things about it, and although I enjoyed it, what I enjoyed most was the fact that my baby sat on my lap for the entire movie!  I tried to take a few pictures of him before the movie began, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it all work properly in the dark.  I did think this picture was strange, though…

3.  We were so desperate to go home that we braved torrential skies to get there.  The clouds were amazing, and the rain they brought was pretty impressive, too!  We made it through Chicagoland before they got hit with their flooding and made it back to the Milwaukee area, which had flooded while we were gone.  Yay for missing flooding!

Check out the lightning on the far left side of the picture.  It was like that all over but I only succeeded in capturing it on camera once.  Here’s a different perspective.  Very dark and very ominous!

4.  We spent a quick weekend at home so we’d have a chance to regroup.  And by regroup, I mean run around like chickens with our heads cut off for 36 hours doing things like going to appointments and shoveling old concrete.  Fun, right?  I was on my way to an acupuncture appointment when Tahd called me.  Before I left, he had told me to check behind the car because while he was shoveling concrete he had set some things there.  I found a few bags, kicked them aside, and left.  This is how our phone conversation went:

Him: Hey, before you left did you happen to take my glasses off the trunk of the car?

Me: (deep breath) Um, no.  You told me to look behind the car, not on it!

Him: Well, I thought you’d see them there.

Me: Why would I see them there?  Why would I think something was on the car by looking behind the car?

Him: I dunno.  I took them off when I was shoveling concrete and they kept slipping.

I felt so badly for him! I could see why he put them where he put them and I could see why he thought I’d see them.  It also made perfect sense to me that I missed them.  I was looking at the floor, not the car.  I told him which route I had taken and he set out to see if he could find them along the way.  I had already made a fast lane change due to the fact that I didn’t see a driver beside me (I swear she was in my blind spot and I looked and just missed her and it totally had nothing to do with the fact that I was on my cell phone…), gone over railroad tracks, and merged onto the freeway and was currently driving 70 miles per hour.  I couldn’t imagine they had stayed on the trunk.  And I was right.  They hadn’t.  They did survive about 5 miles on my trunk, but Tahd found them on a open, nonbumpy stretch of road looking like this:

Pretty, right?  Unfortunately for him, this isn’t the year we elected vision insurance, so he’s back in old glasses for now.  Fortunately for him (and unlike me), his eyes aren’t bad enough to require glasses all the time so a few months with old glasses shouldn’t be a problem.

5.  I couldn’t stop laughing when, on our second leg of our trip which began yesterday, I turned around and saw Gabe traveling like this:

He wasn’t asleep, no.  He was playing on my iTouch, which can be a little tricky to view in sunny conditions if you don’t adjust the brightness.  I suggested to him that I could fix it for him, but he said it was better to do road trips with blankets over your head.  Whatever floats your boat, dude!

6.  For dinner tonight, we met up with Tahd’s parents at Cracker Barrel halfway between us.  I love Cracker Barrel’s down-home feel.  Gabe loves their tchotchkes.

He and Grandma played a game of checkers.

Gabe won. His joy at that realization was enormous!  He certainly wouldn’t have done this if he lost – but I suspect Grandma knew that and that his win wasn’t an accident.  Who wouldn’t want a chance to see this joyful dance?

His joy a few minutes later – while he was sitting in time out for throwing the checkers on the ground after being asked not to – wasn’t quite so enormous!  lol

We’ll have to see what the rest of this crazy travel brings.  I’m hoping for less rain and more adventures outside the four walls of our hotel room!