since booking my flight to arizona in late october, i was thinking i had to work xmas eve. i even asked one of my friends who lives/works in the same neighborhoods to come scoop me and my luggage in the morning, take me to my office and i'd leave my office at like 5 and take marta to the airport. well, turns out i had xmas eve off the entire time. so i did laundry at C+R's during the day to waste time. i then took a cab to marta from my house and was on my way to the airport. i'm trying to remember if there were any funny stories on the plane. since i took a xanax and a benadryl once i boarded, i couldn't tell you. i was knocked out. good thing too. i get really anxious on plane rides over 2 hours.
i got into arizona at 10ish arizona time, midnight my time. my sister warned me that checked luggage always takes forever to get out (she clearly has never waited at Atlanta Hartsfield for luggage) so she picked me up at 10:45. actually, the luggage did take awhile.
so i think i've mentioned that my sisters and i have never really been close. they always had each other, i mean they ARE twins. but since getting older and getting married and having babies, we've gotten closer so my sister and i chatted it up on the 30 minute drive to Gilbert, AZ where she lives. i asked her if we'd venture into phoenix downtown and do touristy things during my stay, and she said she thought i might ask her that. turns out phoenix doesn't really have a proper downtown and all the suburbs surrounding phoenix, like gilbert, are replicas of "downtown" phoenix, which is to say they are retail meccas. so really, we didn't need to leave gilbert. and we never did. we were supposed to go to sedona on saturday, but we never made it out because baby V hadn't slept all Friday night and was fussy all day saturday.
i forget what time i woke up on Christmas morning, but i imagine we did the same things you did. we opened gifts. took some pictures. chilled. we took the dogs out for a run. i should say they took ME out for a run. i've said this before, but since i have no shame i'll say it again... my sister gave birth to baby V on October 25....so she still has a lot of baby weight (she admits this and hates it, so don't look at me like that for calling it out), Cargo, the black lab, is probably the laziest dog you've ever met. He doesn't "retrieve". Atlas, a year-old Beauceron, is the only real athlete of the 3. he's a herding dog. very intelligent. scary looking (think dobermanish), but very sweet. anyway. we all went running to one of the million dog parks in gilbert. THEY ALL BEAT ME. i started off running with cargo - because he's the slowest. i don't think i went further than half a mile before i had to give him back to my sister. They took off shortly thereafter. I don't know how my sister does it. She hasn't done it often, but she has gone running with Cargo, Atlas and the baby. um, what?!
In the evening, all of us (my sister, my brother-in-law, the baby, my brother-in-law's brother (similarly lazy to Cargo but human form) and both the dogs) went over to Andrew's house for Christmas dinner. Andrew is V + L's old roommate. Andrew has this ENORMOUS house and was renting what I call "the west wing" to V+L before they got Atlas and had baby V. He's super nice. L had spent all day cooking lamb and roasting veggies and making homemade bread for the evening and Andrew made acorn squash cups (apples, walnuts, orange zest and brown sugar) inside. I thought it was hilarious that the men were the chefs. My sister openly admits to not being able to cook squat. We watched Narnia I and hung out for awhile before heading back to V+L's tiny house....
speaking of tiny house. my sister lives in a house but i swear it was built for midgets. my brother-in-law, L, is at least 6'3". the house is no problem for V and the baby who are about the same size. HAHAHAHA just kidding. my sister is maybe 5'. when you walk in from the front door or the garage, the kitchen is TINY and the dining room is nonexistent. the living room is half the size of the 2-car garage. Upstairs there are 3 rooms and 2 bathrooms. one is the master which is fairly large (both room and bathroom), then the 2 rooms (one a nursery which never gets used and the other is a guest room) on the other end of the house are the size of a closet. V+L don't have a mattress other than their own, so I slept on an air mattress in the nursery. Adam, my brother-in-law's brother, lived on the couch the entire time. The dude is seriously the laziest person I've ever met. We'd go out for runs or movies or shopping or walking and he'd be on the couch. He'd still be there when we got back. In fact, I had to ask V+L if he'd taken a shower on Saturday because I hadn't seen him move. He took one Saturday night. He got there Wednesday! Gross.
Friday we were supposed to take Atlas to herding class but it had rained the night before and the fields were flooded, so V+L and I ended up taking the dogs and the baby to another of the million dog parks in Gilbert. This particular one was seriously huge. Some dude and his little daughter brought some bulldog looking dog to the dog park and it tried to hump Cargo. My sister went up to the dude and started yelling at him. I understood why she did it, but I don't see very many serious dog owners like that in Atlanta - yelling at owners to be better ones and not let their dogs hump things/other dogs. Then again, I don't hang out in dog parks. My sister said she's gotten into it and had other people yell at her at the dog parks. Drama everywhere.
V and I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that night. I'd said to L that if he let me have V for the evening, I'd babysit baby V (btw I've since given up on calling her that and call her by the name I hate. go with the flow...) the next night while they went to see Marley and Me. Deal.
The movie was LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG but good. I didn't know it was an adaptation of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Love him. Cate Blanchett looked AMAZING. We got home after midnight (I think). I don't know. The movie is three hours long and at that point my body had gotten used to AZ time. bleeeeeeeeeh.
We were supposed to go to Sedona on Saturday but baby V kept up V+L the entire night and still hadn't gone to sleep by the time I got up at 9. I was bummed about it but decided to get in the car and explore Gilbert. I ended up at SanTan Village which is like an Atlantic Station or a Reston Town Center but 100x bigger. Walked around. Shopped. Purchased from Forever 21! (mama C's favorite store!) I felt like the old lady in the junior's department. Eh, I don't care.
When I got back L and Adam were gone. They'd left to help one of L's coworker's move a couch into her loft. As thanks, she offered to cook them dinner. L told her I was in town as well and she said she didn't mind. I wasn't going to go. I felt bad, but I was also hungry. I'm so glad I went. His coworker is Dominican. She's also a NYC style Dominican - which means she's got a thick accent that makes her speak fast in any language and she's also super outgoing. She and her friend who was also over invited Adam out with them to Scottsdale. I told him he should go. Shit, I would have gone had I not promised V+L a date night.
So speaking of... I was scared going into Saturday evening. I forgot to mention that on Friday we all went to REI (V+L's favorite store in the world. They could seriously spend the entire day there and not notice the time go buy). Five minutes after we walked in baby V started to cry. I rocked her in the stroller - nothing. I carried her - nothing. Cry, cry, cry. I eventually gave her to L to change her diaper and V to feed her and she was good for the next hour (I can't believe we were in that fucking store so long), but then she started wailing. V + L were so enthralled by REI that i offered to take her outside and play with her. Well V didn't have her cell phone on her and I didn't have L's number so when she started wailing for what seemed like hours in the car, I called my mom half crying/hyper-ventilating myself to tell her to get Luke out to the car. They both came and we left. 3 hours later. Hated them that day.
So obviously when Saturday night arrived I was not looking forward to it. I was hoping we'd tire her out by the time 10:10 rolled around (their movie time) so that she'd be asleep while they were away. She was good and slept for the most part, but I couldn't lay her down. They'd warned me that if I lay her down and she started squirming it would be a couple of minutes before she started to wail. So because she squirmed each time I set her down, I basically had her on my shoulder for 2+ hours. I managed to set her down 15 minutes before they got back.
Sunday I got up and did some laundry. Baby V had vomitted over pretty much everything I wore. She has a bad case of reflux so she vomits almost everything she eats. Poor baby.
When I went down for breakfast, L mentioned Adam would be taking me to the airport. I thought he was kidding so I laughed. I went upstairs to mention it to V and she said he was serious. GUH. most awkward drive ever.
and now here I am. back in Atlanta and still on AZ time.
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