Palmyra, the Sacred Grove, and the Corning Glass Museum

After Kirtland it was a short-ish drive to our house in New York. Only four hours or so. We got there on Sunday night and were ravenous! I made us a quick dinner and we figured out who would sleep where. Most of the beds were in a big room together upstairs, which was fun. 

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Kirtland, Lake Erie, and the Fire Station house

The next stop on our sadly-out-of-order church history trip was Kirtland! I was excited to see Kirtland because of the historical sites which our church had just this very year acquired! (There were some in Nauvoo, but the main one I knew about was the Kirtland Temple!) I had never been there before so I don't know what really changed with the change of ownership. I've heard from most people that the Community of Christ did a wonderful job taking care of the sites and giving informative tours. So maybe it made not much difference. But it did seem a happy thing to me, to visit these places and know they are "ours" again and we can have missionaries there!

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Nauvoo the Beautiful

We've never had the day of leaving on a trip go so smoothly. We'd packed the kids' suitcases a few days early, Sam had loaded the car Monday morning, I had finished cooking and portioning out food for the cooler and everything was waiting in one spot in the fridge. The kids were sleeping in their clothes with instructions on what to grab when they woke up (shoes and one stuffed animal) and the house had been cleaned, every inch of it, in the four weeks before. That passive voice doesn't quite convey whom had done the cleaning and at what cost, but never mind—it was done. 

Sebastian had said his goodbyes before he left for work at midnight, waking up Sam and each sleepy sibling for a hug, with double hugs for me after I couldn't hold back the tears. He'd been out biking a few hours earlier, and a close encounter with a drunk (we assume) driver had left him, and me, shaken—the car bumped up over the grass and the curb, hitting a tree and barreling straight for Seb until he leaped off his bike and ran. It felt like an inauspicious note on which to say goodbye, but we cheered each other up by talking about how much fun we'd both have, and how we'd FaceTime soon, and then he drove away while I watched and waved from the dark porch. I went to bed and slept fretfully in the way you do when you know you have to wake up early, dreaming about car accidents and missed plane flights.

We were awake and loaded in the car, lists triple-checked and fridge emptied, by 5:15. Said a prayer and our quiet goodbyes to the house. And we were off.

Daisy had made magnets of all the younger kids' favorite toys and stuffed animals to go in the Trip Bags, and once we finally ended our enforced early morning "quiet time," Clementine was happily playing with hers. When she started whimpering and whining a little while later, we put it down to excitement and sleep-deprivation. 

Until, of course, even before breakfast, she threw up. We almost got a bag under her in time (we had prudently laid in a supply of them) and were able to expertly clean up the mess at the next gas station. We speculated on the cause of her upset stomach (excitement, drinking too much water, car sickness) and reassured each other that it couldn't be anything too bad because we all felt fit as fiddles! It often happens, we said knowingly, that small children get sick more than adults do. Their immune systems are less robust. And remember, she had thrown up on the way to Texas too, and it was only the once. Nothing more.

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