This is probably the last post I’ll be able to make for a week or so. We’re off tomorrow to visit The Grandparents in southern Ontario, and I’ll be without the internet. Without the internet! I can hardly type it without tearing up. How will I survive, if I can’t read 20 blogs a day?

I love going to visit my mom — I’ve said it here before, it’s the closest thing to a real vacation I can get. My mom and my older sister do all the meal planning and cooking. My older sister’s teenaged kids adore the Captain and Gal Smiley and take them to the park and for bike rides and downstairs to play video games. All the adults want to hold and play with the Wee One. So all in all, it’s two days when I hardly see a kid and hardly have any housework to do. It’s not unusual for me to actually find myself sitting on the couch with nothing to do.

That said, I am really, really not looking forward to the eight hour drive. It usually goes well for the first four hours or so, then there’s two hours of fussiness, then two hours of total mayhem and wailing. This time I’ve packed little art boxes for the older two kids — lunchpails with self-sharpening pencil crayons, coloured paper, stickers, and little colouring books. They also have a few little cars and some plastic animals in there. I’m really hoping that this stuff is the equivalent of eight hours of fun. It is, right? RIGHT?

We’ll be driving back on Monday, so I’ll try to stop in and say hi on Tuesday, in between about a million loads of laundry. There better be a big bowl of ice cream waiting for me when we get home!