Stella and I recently returned from a week long visit to Arizona to visit my cousin, Ivy, and her brood – or as I like to call them: The Closest Thing Stella Will Ever Know as Cousins Her Own Age. Being as they are my cousin’s kids, I have no idea what that makes their technical relation to Stella or how it incorporates into my irregularly formed (maternal) family tree. (The lineage on my mother’s side is a blog post all unto itself. Let’s just say that there aren’t nearly enough branches on that tree.) Regardless, this was an opportunity to get to not only visit Ivy and her family, but also my aunt, uncle and grandparents. Plus it was an opportunity for Stella and I to spend some one-on-one quality time together, and to indoctrinate her to the world of air travel.

As it turns out, Stella is just as awesome of an air traveler as she is a car traveler – especially considering every single one of our flights – both coming and going – were delayed. I was hyper-sensitive of the fact that I was going to be trapped in a confined space with an unpredictable 3-year-old, and was loaded down with snacks, books, videos for the iPod and a straight jacket – you know, just in case. Much to my delight (and that of our fellow travelers) all she needed was a window seat, a cranberry juice from the in-flight beverage service and an episode or two of Wonder Pets. Oh, and the flight safety video. God, did she love that thing. Leading up to the trip, I did the best I could to prep her for what to expect with air travel, while also trying to be careful not to freak her out too much. It all seemed to work out pretty well, except that from the first minute after we got into our seats, she barraged me with a non-stop string of questions: Why isn’t the door closed? Why aren’t we moving yet? Are we taking off now? How about now? How about now? Is the plane moving? Why isn’t it moving? Are we in the air yet? When are we going to be in the air? I think I’m a little bit scared. But not really. Are we taking off now? Why aren’t we moving? I am fairly certain she beat her own record at most questions asked in the period of 10 minutes.

Whereas the running joke amongst my Arizona family is that each time I visit, I bring the rain, this time I somehow managed to bring the heat. Within a day of our arrival, the temperature immediately spiked from moderately hot to the highest temps so far this summer (110 degrees, thank you very much), making our evening flashlight tour at the Desert Botanical Gardens something resembling a stroll through a brick oven. Most of the remaining activities involved either massive doses of air conditioning or water. That’s the beauty thing about places where you swear you are living 3 blocks from the sun – they don’t tolerate it either. You can’t go 2 feet without running into a pool or an air conditioner. And, when in Rome…

Aside from spending the better part of the time dodging harmful UVBs, we managed to get in some serious fun time. It was truly a vacation. While Kaden, Gianna and Stella busied themselves in the play room – yes, they have an entire room in which they get to house all of their toys – Ivy and I got to hang out and swap stories about our door-knob-touching husbands, the joy and pain of parenting, and the subtle differences between a quesadilla and a cheese crisp. [Something I had to learn about the hard way while making all three kids lunch one day. I still don’t think I really have it clear, but one thing I do know is my lack of knowledge on this issue just about ruined Kaden and I’s relationship forever.]

One of the upsides to all that sun is NAPPING! Although Stella has not napped with any regularity in some months now, I had started noticing that afternoons were getting harder and harder to get through, and as such, I was laying in wait for my perfect opportunity to inch her back towards a daily sleep routine. This trip was just that opportunity. I knew there would be no way that we were going to be spending that much time in the pool without REQUIRED napping, and decided this was my opportunity to ease her back into them without her noticing actually what I was doing. Sure enough, she napped every single day while we were there (6 days straight!) and when we got back, Steve and I vowed that mission number one this summer was going to be that we were going to get her back on a napping schedule. By actually saying this out loud I will probably be ruining it forever, but she has napped every day since we have been back. That sound you hear? That’s me, knocking feverishly on the wood table.

After hanging out at Ivy’s for a couple of days, my Aunt Tess came out to pick up Stella, Gianna and I so we could all make a trip out to my see my Grandparents, which meant three things: a casserole, Scrabble and vodka tonics. Grandma did not disappoint. I’m always a bit leery of playing Scrabble with the women in my family, but I think that comes mostly from playing it with my mother – to whom it is a blood sport. So, while the girls napped, Aunt Tess, Grandma and I played a leisurely game whilst also getting to catch up on the latest goings on. And sipping a V-T, of course.

After being beaten (surprisingly, only mildly) by Grandma we rousted the girls, and headed out to my aunt and uncle’s ranch. They had done an amazing amount of remodeling and landscaping since my last visit, and it was wonderful to see how many things will actually grow in the desert. To my surprise, not just cactus. Stella was beside herself getting to see and touch so many new things, and the highlight of her trip out to Smiling Dog Ranch was getting to have a night swim with a pool full of frogs. It was all we could do to keep her from drowning the poor things, she was so intent on catching every one of them.

From there, it was back to the ‘burbs, where we spent the rest of our time wrangling children. By the time we headed out to the Arizona Science Center I think Stella was starting to show the wear and tear of a girl who had reached her max. Although we had a good time making and flying paper airplanes and lifting ourselves with pulleys, her volatility meter was pushing into the red. Considering the week we had, I couldn’t really blame her much. She had done such a wonderful job of acclimating to one new face after another, sleeping in new and different places, and expending truckloads of physical and emotional energy. It was a great reminder as to what a great kid we have in her.

There was a healthy chunk of my childhood and adolescence where I spent at least a portion of each summer in Arizona. Even in my early 20s, I would head out there for a week at a time to vacation. Now, here I am taking my own daughter out there to the same place where I spent innocent, then not-so-innocent summers. As the week went on, I would get hit with these little waves of nostalgia. On one hand, I would remember that summer when I was 13 and cruising around in a golf cart, or the one when I was 16, and the only one with a valid driver’s license. On the other hand, I would be realizing that it was now, all of a sudden, my kid who was running around the pool, and sitting at my Grandma’s dining room table eating cookies. And as we flew home, on my 35th birthday, all I could think was that there was no place I’d rather be.

My pictures
Ivy’s pictures