A Very Big Day

A quick post, while everyone naps on Sunday afternoon.

Saturday, Hottie Friend came and picked up Pequita around 8 am to pal around the Farmer's Market together so the rest of us could sleep in. She dropped off a tired and hungry baby around noon - I was in the shower so didn't get the play-by-play, but perhaps some pictures, HF?

I set off with Homestead Mama, my parents and the babes around 1 pm for a friends birthday party for her 3 sons, twins age 10 and the other 8 years old. We spent 3 hours at their house enjoying the cool summer day. There were screaming children running around all sugared up on cake and playing with new birthday toys, adults sipping beer and chatting on the lawn, and later on fishing in the pond and skeet shooting. (I told you we lived in a rural area.) Pequita spent the afternoon attached to Homestead Mama, and I spent my time with an 8-day-old barnacle stuck to my chest nursing. Just as H-Mama and I were ready for a nap, we all got in our car and headed off for a city about an hour away to go to the zoo - I slept the whole way there. The fertility clinic that we used to get our babies was having their 10th anniversary, and had rented out a local zoo for all its clients, past and present. I know there were over 2500 RSVPs, and when we arrived (about 20 minutes after the scheduled start) the place was already packed with children of all ages, hundreds of minivans in the parking lot and more strollers (single, double & triple) than I've ever seen in one place. The RE (reproductive endocrinologist) Doc who owns the practice is a whiz at marketing, and I'm sure the press was there and that it was a tax write-off. Regardless, it was quite an amazing time - the staff we had grown to know and appreciate over the past 4 years were there milling about, and the Doc spent the entire 4 hours that the zoo stayed open for the event at the end of a line that resembled the line to see Santa at Christmastime at the mall. We enjoyed the catered hot dogs and hamburgers, decided to stroll the zoo and come back to shake hands with the Doc later to avoid the line. He'd met Pequita, but we wanted to introduce him to Monito. So stroll the zoo we did. Pequita is old enough to really enjoy animals which are obvious to her - the petting zoo parts were her favorite. We patted an elephant and some goats, and saw tigers, penguins and many other animals. Grandma and Grandpa posed for a picture with the unhappiest penguin on the face of creation.

The highlight for Pequita was riding atop Grandpa for most of the trek around the zoo.

It was perhaps too much for me 8 days post-C-section, carrying the nursing baby the whole time. I was exhausted and sore by the end of the day, but we had a really great time. Upon returning to the zoo entrance, we found the good Doc still at the end of a huge line of grateful families all waiting to get their picture taken with him, and show off the kids he helped them have. We decided to skip it entirely and go visit the office in the next 2 weeks while Homestead Mama is still on parental leave. I have some expensive meds to donate to them anyway - they give them to patients with no insurance who need help affording the IVF process, and my account gets credited. This will help with storage costs for the embryos we still have in the cryo-tank; we'll be hanging on to them for a while longer until the dust settles with our family and we are certain we don't want more kids.

Needless to say, we all slept in on Sunday morning.