Cleveland Trip: Day 1 (Friday)

We had a wonderful trip to Cleveland!

I know I won’t have time to post about it all at once, so I’m starting with Friday.

We were, miraculously, packed and ready on Friday morning and left the driveway at 9:04 (we were shooting for 9 am, that’s close enough!).

The kids rode okay in the van. It took us about six hours to drive. BabyGirl took a couple of gigantic naps, and JediBoy was thrilled to find a new-to-him Pokemon Ruby cartridge in the bag I packed for him.

We stopped a little more than halfway to have lunch, and got to our hotel about 4:30. JediBoy was especially tickled to be staying in a hotel for only the third time in his life, and BabyGirl had made a GuateTot friend before we even left the lobby. Both kids liked the elevators and the luggage carts.

We brought our luggage in, cleaned up a bit and changed clothes so that we could head out to the party at our adoption agency. BabyGirl wore one of the dresses from the open air market in Guatemala City and JediBoy wore his Guatemalan soccer set.

We weren’t sure what to expect from the open house, and we were pleasantly surprised. They had a bunch of things set up outside - bounce houses, snow cones, basketball, sidewalk chalk, balloon animals, and so on.

The whole building was open for us to peek around, and in the basement was the real party with food and dancing and a visit from some of the Guatemalan officials. There was lots to do and plenty of people to chat with. It was a very nice way to spend the evening, especially getting to meet our adoption case worker and the director of the agency. We are so grateful to the agency for helping us become a family of four.

After the party, we headed back to the hotel, where we faced the only truly unpleasant stretch of the trip. First, we ordered a pizza that was promised to come in 45 minutes but came an hour later than the time promised. Once we’d eaten and were ready for bed, BabyGirl had a terrible time trying to sleep, crying and waking and screaming most of the night. The only solid hour of sleep I got was between 7 and 8 in the morning. The next morning, we figured out it was probably because she’d had pineapple in her fruit cup at lunch. The only other time she’s had pineapple, she broke out in hives. Sure enough, Saturday morning she had tiny hives on her face and arms, poor thing. Benadryl to the rescue! We got much more sleep the other two nights.

More details to come later.