Visiting Oakdale/ Sarah

My step-sister Sarah came down from Arkansas with her husband Thomas and my niece Adeline. Adeline is 6 months old now. I’m usually not that good with babies –I don’t really know how to relate to them. But with this baby I felt right at home and actually enjoyed spending time with her. 
 
There were some awkward moments between us though. Adeline looks a lot like Thomas –who is tall and goofy. But she also makes these faces that remind me of Len from Toastmasters. Len is a Sagittarian in its vice –a little too brutally honest and mentally focused w/out much sympathy or compassion. But he also has random bursts of energy and can be downright jovial from time to time. This is how Adeline is. She is quiet and will look you right in the eye, but she gets this puzzled/ inquisitive look on her face like she’s judging you and can’t figure you out. Then she gets bored and looks off in another direction. Then when you try to amuse her with something she lights up and laughs. It’s like watching a baby Len.

It’s interesting to see Adeline do these things because she is also a Sagittarian. I worry she may become too mentally focused, but being raised in the south I imagine she’ll end up going more the Taylor Swift route and find herself bordering Aries tendencies more –at least that’s my hope. It is weird to see a baby more mentally focused –the way her eyebrows furrow when she looks at things instead of reacting with just pure emotion at everything. Sometimes she’ll be focused and intent on figuring something out, the next she’ll be distracted and won’t care about what’s going on around her. Baby genius.

Meanwhile I was concerned Sarah and I would have trouble re-relating to each other since we hadn’t been in the same room for about 6 months since last I visited in December. Nope. We picked up right where we left off and were chattering away. That’s the great thing about unconditional love –you connect with someone instantly as if they were an extended part of yourself you were away from for a little while but then picked up and out back- like a missing puzzle piece that falls right into place where it had been before. It’s like no time has passed at all and they’re exactly where you left them.

One of the things Sarah and I talked about was housing prices. She said that in Arkansas things are a lot less expensive. A two story house out by a lake was worth $100,000. Sarah pays around $700 a month for rent in her house –I pay $1000 a month for rent in my apartment. Arkansas sounds nice…

Emily also made an appearance. I was worried she and mom would get into some sort of an argument, but they didn’t say much to each other at all. Em slept in pretty late both days. She did get to spend time with Sarah though. Our grandma also came by to visit. I went and got a slice of chocolate pie from the kitchen and gma kept asking me of it was carrot cake. She needs a hearing aid but she doesn’t want to go get one. So for 5 minutes she kept asking if it was a chocolate carrot cake and I kept trying to tell her there was no carrot involved (had there been I wouldn’t have been eating it). So we sat on the couch together eating pie and checking in with what we were both up to.

Meanwhile my step-dad Dean was going in and out of the hospital where his cousin was in a coma. His 50 year old cousin had a heart attack and had fallen slumped over on the floor. The way she had fallen made her head fall over her neck and cut off her air way so her brain had been deprived of oxygen for about 8 hours. He was with his family waiting to see if she would wake up.

So most of the weekend was spent sitting on the floor watching TV and visiting with Sarah, Adeline, and grandma. I was also given a special project to paint a wooden horse that was faded black and had no eyes/ features for my grandpa. I don’t have much paint left from my college days because I decided water color sucked and acrylic was too high- maintenance. So I grabbed what acrylic I had and some paint brushes I didn’t care about and sat in front of the wooden horse. The only color I had a lot of was metallic gold so I decided to make the horse a carousel-like style. It took me 2 days to paint two coats of gold over the horse. Then my final couple hours at mom’s were spent painting on the details –eyes/nose/reins/saddle… complete with glitter!

I told Sarah and my Dean I was going to head out at 3pm. It sucked coming to Oakdale at 3pm on Friday because what should be an hour and a half drive turns into 3 hours worth of traffic. I decided that for Sunday I just wanted to get home, catch up on emails, detox and relax. Unfortunately –as usual- mom wanted me to stay until 6pm. That would mean I would get home just in time to collapse into bed and wait for morning to go straight to work. I opted out of that option and when I got home mom was thoroughly displeased with me. To make matters worse 15 minutes before I left Dean’s cousin awoke from her coma so he drove straight to the hospital to see her so I didn’t get to say goodbye to him when Em and I took off at 3.

I wish Oakdale was closer. Or teleportation was possible. One of the two.