So Thursday morning I said to
Alan, “I have a half-baked idea for you…” and Friday
afternoon we found ourselves driving to Long Island. My grandma
is selling her house and my parents and sister were going to
help her do some packing. I was missing the family and thought
it would be fun to surprise them. Since it was our first
overnight trip, I had no idea how much to pack for Lex – so I
packed just about all of his clothes :) Somedays he wears the
same thing all day, but other days we go through lots of
clothes. It all depends. I figured better safe than sorry (or
doing laundry). The trip down was rainy but smooth. We stopped
a few times to feed Lex. We hit rust hour traffic at one point,
so we stopped at McD’s and had dinner. By the time we were on
the road again the traffic was flowing again.

Saturday my parents got there. We stayed inside as a
surprise. My sister walks in, sees us, smiles and waves “hi”,
then does a total double-take. It was beautiful. Then my mom
walks in, sees us, and yells for about 2 minutes. Heheh… it
was awesome. Then she walks over and takes Lex out of my arms.
After his hugs the rest of us got some hugs too. Its tough to
surprise my mom – which made the whole thing that much more fun
:)

Overall we had a really nice weekend.
We didn’t get much packing done for my grandma, but I think she
was ok with that. Visiting is always more fun than working :)
She was also happy to show her new great-grandbaby off to all
of her friends and neighbors.

The drive
home took just about forever. We ended up stopped on I95 for a
little over an hour due to an accident. Then we stopped to help
a guy jump start his car (there were lots of cars that couldn’t
start after that, probably from people running the AC and radio
without the car on). Spent about 20 minutes helping this guy,
but no luck. He think he had electrical problems ’cause the
battery seemed ok. So we moved on. Our quick dinner break ended
up taking an hour because Lex was sick and tired of his car
seat. He screamed every time we tried to put him back in it. So
we hung out in the parking lot for awhile
feeding/changing/soothing him. Finally back on the road in time
to hit construction in the next city. Overall the drive was a
long one – but well worth it!

Now we’re
home and I promised Lex a few car seat free days. I think he
appreciates that. He slept sooo much yesterday. I think he was
recovering from the weekend. I was hoping it would carry over
into last night, but no such luck. Oh well.