Highlights from The Midwest

After a glorious week in Mexico, Eric and I headed to the midwest to freeze our buns off for a few days visiting family.

We spent a quick 12 hours in Chicago eating too much and shivering with my parents and then headed to Fort Wayne, Indiana for Eric's grandmother's 90th birthday party (part of the trip from Chicago to Fort Wayne was on the Megabus! which was much more normal and comfortable than we had been hoping for.)

I really hope that someday I get to throw myself a 90th birthday party. Isn't that amazing? You're all invited.

The party was great fun and in addition to giving her a gift, Eric and I also received a gift from his grandmother. It was a quilt she had made for Belvedere which we will treasure.

(This strange backwards gift exchange reminds me of one of the great injustices of my childhood: my younger brother threw such a fit one year on my birthday that I was getting presents and he wasn't, that for years afterward he would always get a couple of presents on my birthday. Did I ever get presents on his birthday? Of course not. I learned too late that I should have been a more difficult child...)

After the party, the family (about 25 people) all went out to dinner to keep celebrating. It was a good chance for me to talk more with some of Eric's relatives who I was meeting for the first time. At one point in the conversation, one of Eric's cousins' children who was about 12 years old made an innocuous but bizarre and nonsensical comment that no one seemed to know quite what to do with. We were all just quiet for a moment. Then the boy's father who was sitting right across from us looked Eric straight in the face and said, "I made that." (I nearly peed myself laughing, though what is needed to make me pee myself isn't nearly as high a bar as it used to be.)

At the end of the meal when they brought another birthday cake, we were instructed by grandmother not to sing. So I suggested, subversive as always, that we hum instead. Eric's uncle heard the idea and ran with it: he started loudly humming 'happy birthday' and the rest of the family joined right in. And it had the most amazing effect - the whole restaurant got kind of quiet and it seemed that everyone was staring at us wondering what in the world we were doing.

I think at my 90th birthday party I would like everyone to hum 'happy birthday' to me, just like that.