Friday, May 14th and closing

It was a strange mix of hubris, exasperation and desperation that led Carrie and me to believe that we could make the trip from Salt Lake City to Seattle in one day without an overnight stay in Le Grande, OR, as we had originally planned.

We had started out that morning with the best of intentions; Carrie, Carla, Gaboli and I ate at the Olympian Greek restaurant in Salt Lake City - excellent breakfast, wonderful Greek Coffee - and planned on meeting up in Boise later on. Carla and Axia took off in one car, and Carrie, the twins and I in another. After the first stop things were going fine, but when we had to stop due to a crying child less than an hour later, we decided to tough it out and push through the night.

Bad idea - but then again, in retrospect, so was the entire endeavor of driving three month old twins and an eleven year old Yorkshire Terrier across a thousand miles and over a mile in elevation to Utah.  If driving all night to hit Seattle a full sixteen hours earlier than we would have otherwise was a mistake, it was certainly the right one to make.

I am certainly glad that Carrie's extended family got the chance to see the twins, as well as the fact that Carla followed us from the small town confines of Richfield, Utah to the big city of Seattle, Washington so that she could have a chance at a new life, as well as helping Carrie and I out with the twins for a few months.  But neither Carrie nor I are particularly keen on making any more trips with the kids that takes any longer than  the drive from our house to their pediatricians on First Hill in Seattle, at least not for a couple of years or so.

Babies are tough creatures at heart - muh tougher than we as adults give them credit for - but Gabriel and Oliver are still recovering, emotionally and physically, from the ordeal; Gabriel in particular seems to have picked up a sore throat that is most likely the symptomatic manifestation of an unknown something that had been transmitted to him by the many pairs of unwashed hands that had handled him. His cries are currently rather raspy shadows of their former selves; being such, his short throaty peals are especially dolorous. Note to selves and others: no handling of our twins with unsanitzed hands for the next few months.

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Yesterday, I awoke to a lawn  that had been sorely neglected by human hands  - but taken care of to extreme abundance by the wonderfully bountiful Pacific Northwest spring rains - for three weeks. So long was the grass that I had to essentially cut it twice with our little manual push mower. Seeing as how we had returned home a scant seven hours prior, after three hours of labor, I was pretty much ready to pack it in. Making a trip through the chaotic, crowded aisles of Costco with two crying babies, who were surely freshly traumatized from their recent ordeal, in tow didn't help things any. This morning, I did a reset by running around Green Lake and stopping off at Peets for Coffee. Then  things seemed to be much better.

Welcome home.