texas

There's nothing like 18 hours in a car, only to arrive in steamy Texas at 3am. As I fumbled around our rented house, trying to find the key box and then trying, with no light, to decipher the numbers on the buttons, a very large and unconcerned raccoon watched me from about five feet away and hundreds of mosquitoes, bred in the recent floods here, attacked me. Welcome back.

For all of the dread my wife and I expressed before this trip began, the actual driving--the almost 30 hours of it--wasn't bad at all. Credit for that goes to our boys, who were better and more patient than we could ever have expected. We only did two real pushes after they were asleep, leaving them awake for the majority of the drive, and they did amazingly well. The older boy watched DVDs, played with his new firemen (which my wife bought him in lieu of the army men he wanted--"military toys just don't seem okay these days," she wisely observed), snacked, sang, played tug-of-war with his brother, looked at books, and was just generally great. The baby was very patient and spent a lot of time chewing on plastic toys and on his favorite book.

We got an hour or so of sleep Friday night, then spent Saturday unpacking and getting acquainted with the fantastic place we're rented from an old friend of mine. It's child-friendly to an extreme we've rarely seen (without being completely child-centered) and has incorporated some of the design solutions that we are considering for our own place. Sadly, Texas houses sprawl and have much more space than our little Northeastern Holly House. We met friends for lunch at the Lamar Central Market and just basically re-adjusted to life down here, where it's hot and buggy.