A Baba’s eye view of Grandma driving herself, the beloved, and the lil’ monkey off to the airport through the wildfirey haze. Thence to parts Midwestern for a three-day junket to watch Grampy tread the boards in the Role of A Lifetime. Yes, Lear. That Lear. King Lear.
Baba stays home with the lil’ peanut, a fine little fellow but a mere dot of the whole brood. Perhaps its sunny exclamation point. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, all the same, to have an out-of-state child.
Lesbian Dad is written by a parent who answers to the name "Baba" and works toward a world in which amor does indeed vincit omnia. 
Oh, yes, I know. Recently the youngest said “let’s do something fun because we are home alone” – meaning, home alone the FOUR of us, missing the big girl
I want us all in one place, too.
But what a role! It’s a pity you miss it.
So you are staying behind with the peanut…I’m sorry to hear that you won’t be making your way to Minneapolis to stay with us and our CRAZY children. Some other time?
It would be a fine, fine world, if we could spend a month of every summer schmoozing with old chums and swatting ’skeeters on porches, back in the Land of Ten Thousand Cows (I know; I know: it’s 10,000 Lakes, but Cows sounds so much better).
As yet, our modest means, and the need to earn ‘em — Necessity’s sharp pinch! — doth keep us Westward. And me homeward. A gal can dream, though.
Yegods that’s disturbing. But in a mesmerising kind of way. Also, the page I copped it offa advertises a pernicious thing: a ringtone adults (putatively) can’t hear! Don’t tell yer kids.
And what will you be doing to pass the time with 2/3 of your gang over yonder?
Making daisy chains, and sighing. Then after that we’re gluing kidney and lima beans on paper plates in the shapes of their faces.
Okay, well. Truthfully, having some nice quality time with each other. And doing guy stuff. Which to me means, leaving the house a shambles until an hour or two before the beloved et al. return. D’oh!
:]
Hey, I know…well, that whole street. Living across and all.
Okay, so you think being in a separate state from your kid is weird. Try being in a separate state (MN) from your kid AND visiting with two old friends, one with 2 kids and the other with 3. It was wonderful to see them and all (one of them is a frequent reader of this here blog by the way), but it did feel pretty strange being inserted into someone else’s family life sans my own kid. At least I was fully cognizant of the preschooler mindset and could, for a day, treat those kids kinda like I would treat my own.
Well, actually, that’s not true at all. I’m forgetting that I fed a 3 year old and a 4 1/2 year old cookies at 9am. The parents had an appt they couldn’t change, they suggested I take the kids to a nearby cafe and gave me no pointers as to what they could and couldn’t eat…and I figured they only see me once every few years so I …I gave in.
The dreaded Auntie/Granny prerogative.