With a nice little series of coincidences--Mom already planning to be in Austin, Meredith deciding to have Danny & Joanna's wedding shower the first weekend of spring break--I decided to brave the trip up to the farm via car for the first time ever. It went much, much more easily than I expected. I never even had to get out the portable DVD player!
Mom helped drive on the way up by driving through most of Oklahoma (what an awful lot of nothing that was), but on the way back I was on my own. Turned out to be easy--it was 8-1/2 hours, but we stopped only once, in Blackwell, OK, for a potty break and to fill up. The kids were fantastic, and Jonathan loves to play the Alphabet Game now.
It went so well that I'm planning to do it again for our summertime trip and go up there after the wedding on 31 May. The nice thing about it, aside from saving on the airplane tickets, is that I can take my harp with me so that Mom & I can play (and hopefully soon that will include Daddy too, once I find some baroque trio music that he enjoys playing). It was fun to set my harp up in the library and see it there every time I walked by the French doors.
We had a great time in Kansas. As always, I was fed wonderful meals and poured wonderful wine with dinner, and I quite enjoyed eating after dark by candlelight in the library. The children enjoyed themselves immensely, and Jonathan even went on a little story-writing kick and produced four quite interesting stories on the computer. One afternoon Terry & George came for lunch, and then while Terry & Kayleigh went for a walk and Jonathan composed stories upstairs, Mom, Dad, George, and I set up in the library and played together--the three of them on recorders (alto, tenor, and bass) and me on the harp. It was great fun and we must have played nearly an hour.
I'm looking forward to our summer trip!