For the Dude

I've chosen this year's anniversary present. I loved this design from SamSarah so much that I ordered the floss and fabric the same day that I ordered the pattern.

I'm thinking airplane stitching...

What? Where am I going? We're taking my grandmother to Vegas for her 85th birthday. Were we talking during her 80th birthday? I haven't been blogging that long? Let me tell you...

Twelve of us embarked on a seven-day cruise, including my cousin whose kids were one and two. Okay, I could probably stop there, and you would know how painful it was, but it gets better. Sissy, the dude, and I had flown a red-eye across country, throwing off our clocks and making us cranky. The dude and I had to share a room with my grandmother. She insisted on keeping the tv on all the time at full blast, and she wanted to keep it on to sleep. When we told her she was out-voted, she cried to my mother. There were lots of little fights about what we would do and when. Getting to late seating dinner was an ordeal (and what were we thinking keeping the kids up that long?). My youngest niece was seasick the last four days. The whole plan was ill-conceived. At the end of it all, my grandmother says, "that was nice but I would have rather gone to Vegas." The dude had to hold me back. Literally. (And I use that term correctly.)

So now that Vegas is a five-hour flight (as opposed to the 45 minutes it used to take us to get there) we're taking her to Vegas. My grandmother has been coming on vacation with my nuclear family for as long as we've been taking family vacations--and we still occasionally vacation as a family. Since I graduated from college--almost twenty years ago now--every year, my father says to my mother, "This is the last time I take your mother anywhere." My parents have the shortest memories because every year there she is! But if she lives to be 90, she's getting a trip to nowhere.

We have learned a few lessons from the last trip. The dude is going to a chess tournament that weekend. My cousin's husband is staying home with the kids. My mother has scheduled us within an inch of our lives; I've taken to calling it the van Schurman invasion of Vegas. And the dude, upon seeing her plan remarked, "Mussolini didn't really get the trains running on time. People were just too scared to report when they were late."

And you wondered how I turned out this way...