It was leaving Old Lyme that made me want to go home, 36 hours before my flight. Driving on I-91 near Hartford does not especially endear the state to me, and I wasn't sure how the visit would go, and so forth. Maybe I had just been gone long enough.
Visiting RPR was fine and good and fun, of course. Someone told me a while ago about how if you stick your tongue out at a baby, it'll stick its out at you, in a reflex. SFR was the first baby I remembered to try that on. She's three months old and a perfect age for this game: if a little old for the reflex bit, not too young to chortle and smile and obviously watch and interact with us. Babies are way time-consuming, aren't they? We talked and played with the baby and bathed and fed and changed and dressed her, and that's about what we got done while I was there. I got to coo over her closetful of adorable dresses, and I read her A Snowy Day and On the Day You Were Born and When the Elephants Walk and Guess How Much I Love You, and I cooked! yes, I cooked bacon for BLTs.
At the birthday party I got to meet three other hatchlings I hadn't yet seen, plus two others I hadn't seen since before they were mobile. Despite quantities of blocks all over the floor, the oldest of this set of cousins wanted yet more blocks that she spotted in a clear container whose screw-top she couldn't manage. She did not believe my assertion that this was only a large rattle. She is 2.5 and about the size of a four-year-old. I met RDC's best man's first baby when he was two months old (cute but boring) during the Connecticut detour of our New York City trip, and now he is nearly two (cute still and no longer boring). He had a baby brother in May, who is RDC's new godson. I hadn't met the birthday girl yet or the huge 2.5-year-old's huge six-month-old younger brother. And I got to play with them all.
Soon after RPR left another, family birthday party, farther from Boston, where she would be later than my travel allowed, I left too. I hadn't previously arranged to visit Charenton, and I didn't call ahead of time because if I left Nisou's parents voicemail both of us would be disappointed, and besides, voicemail might only mean they were in the garden and not really not at home. And they were home, hooray! I saw (and copied) photographs of their visit to France for Siblet's birth, and saw photographs of their days in Tuscany (jaw-droppingly opulently beautiful), and heard about their 40th anniversary party, and had only an hour with them, but an hour we were all glad to have, before I had to leave for Logan.
Once again I flirted with expense, fueling the car at Natick, 20 miles from Boston, risking Thrifty's perceiving the fraction gone. And that was after disaster flirted with me: as a minivan and I merged side by side in two lanes, leaving 84 for the Pike, the minivan was unable to pick a lane. It continued to fail to do so after I beeped twice, and even after I pounded the horn it continued to drift left, wanting to push me into the concrete wall that served instead of a shoulder. I braked, let the fucker pass on my right rather than sideswipe me, and as soon as we were both on the Pike I passed her slow ass on the left, maturely bestowing upon the driver a dirty look as I did so. As Ellen DeGeneres says, "That'll show 'em."
I returned the car and shuttled to Logan and was through security and at the gate a full hour before boarding began. I hate that that extra time is required, both by airlines and by prudence. I would have liked to linger at Charenton. But now RDC suggested France for Thanksgiving, with a five-month-old Siblet and an Emlet that much closer to three. I long for that.