Back Home and Bullets

As I expected, the trip back went very smoothly. I made it in less than 6 hours, including a 25 minute stop (only one!!). I would have arrived home 30 minutes earlier had my son not needed a bathroom stop in northern Philly. I took advantage of the stop to buy fruits and vegetables, since I stopped at a grocery store.

My sons handle car trips like pros. It was not always like that, of course, but we got them used to them really early. I don't think we'd do this again, but we did three excruciatingly long trips to Michigan for Thanksgiving, three years in a row, when my brother- and sister-in-law lived there. The first two were from MA, when our oldest son was 9 and 21 months respectively and took 14-16 hours. The last one was with both boys, aged 2 1/2 y.o. and 6 months and it took "'only" 11-12 hours (it was from here). We do like to travel a lot, so they have to be used to it. Music does the trick for them, I just have their favorite CDs ready and they generally cope well.

Now for some bullets. I'm just like Libby, I have a hard time keeping them short, but I'll try :)

• I have tons of things to blog about, but I wanted to catch up on blog reading, since I didn't get to spend much time online at MIL's house. I checked all the blogs in my blogroll, but I still need to go back and read those that I was already behind before last week

• My husband is flying home from Brazil tonight. I miss him SO MUCH!!! and the boys do too.

• We just got home from traveling and we leave again on Friday to Nashville, where I'm presenting at a conference. The whole family is going because my aunt lives there and we're going to meet my cousin's little girl who's 17 months old.
  

• My paper's not ready yet, but I'm going to just change the one I presented in April a bit, so I'm not really worried.
  

• A friend from Brazil is coming to present at the conference. We put a panel together when I was there in January.

• I feel guilty about leaving the cat home alone. We usually leave him at a friend's house, but this time she couldn't take him. Our neighbor was/will be feeding him, but I know he probably misses us terribly... It's tough to have pets, isn't it?

• I don't know if I mentioned it her, probably not, but my mother had surgery one week ago. Her thyroid was removed. She's doing fine.

All right, I'm sure I had more things to say, but this will do for now :) .

Updated to add:

• I never had time to report that we started having some sleep disturbances with the 2 year old in the past two weeks. He wakes up crying and it's hard to get him to sleep again. Some nights we had to split up -- daddy with one boy in the futon in their room and mommy with the other in our bed.

• He slept with me during our trip and even got to nurse during the night a few times in spite of the fact that he hasn't done so since June (o-oh)... He's in his crib now. He woke up a couple of times, but went back to sleep fairly quickly. Wish us luck staying out of the family bed :)