Drives to B town

Every other weekend or so we go to see my in-laws. It is about an hour and ten minute drive (give or take a few minutes) and the drives over the years are kind of a barometer for how my life is going in that moment in time...hard to explain, let me try to...

After Madeline was born that first drive to Tyler's family home was scary. Madeline was tiny. Getting ready to spend a day away with a new baby was daunting. I sat in the back seat with her certain that she would wake up screaming at any moment. She didn't. Over the months I got better at packing her diaper bag ("always be prepared"), she got better at entertaining herself, I moved up to the front seat and discovered that you could really enjoy a drive with your baby-toddler- little miss priss. I love to watch the seasons change the trees along the highway. I love to sing horrible kids' songs with her all along the way and make Tyler laugh with my interpretive dance moves. I love that every time we drive by Chuck E Cheese Madeline screams, "Chuck E Cheese! That's where I had my birthday! I had one birthday at home and one birthday at Chuck E Cheese!" Every time.

Last Sunday I watched her in the mirror doing something new- she was watching the rain make patterns on the windshield. I got so nostalgic. I remember that. All of the drives I took with my parents to my grandmothers' houses when I was little. All of the ways I learned to entertain myself along the way. Rain patterns on the windshield, the up and down movements of power lines running beside the highway, and my favorite was the way the rows in soybean fields seemed to move as we went driving by. I love how much she is absorbing about the world around her. She points out things to me during our dives that I never notice. She reads books, loves to make Tucker laugh, and jabbers at us all the way there and all the way home. Our drives have changed so much and in that little bubble of a world in our car flying down the road life is good (except when we hit the same darn bump in the highway every time coming home and Tucker wakes up and screams for 20 minutes until we pull into our driveway- that part ducks with an s).