Iowa

Took a trip down to Iowa to visit family. This was Patrick's first time for so long in the car and visiting this side of my family. It's kind of a long drive for a baby, about 4 to 4.5 hours. He did okay on the drive down. Patrick slept the first half of the trip, Dubuque, and then cried almost the entire second half. It's not easy listening to him cry for 1.5 hours, but he starts crying again after pulling over to calm him down so it doesn't seem to make sense to pull over. The ride home was much better, he slept almost the whole way, save about 45 minutes of the drive.

We went to visit for two reasons, 1. Patrick is almost 8 months and my Grandma has yet to see him. 2. My uncle Sam was coming to Iowa to visit. He was in military service for many years and we never saw him much. The last time I was my uncle Sam was about 15 years ago. When ever he is near we try to make time to visit with him. This also became a good excuse to help my grandma "clean" her house.

My Grandma has become a hoarder after my Grandpa died, I've heard this is common. My mom took last week off to help Grandma clean, organize, and secretly purge the house. Since Grandma will not throw anything away the family will toss things into garbage bags and then take the garbage bags to the car so she will not see them and pull things back out. The other trick to cleaning is to ask Grandma if you can have something and then either donate it to Goodwill or just toss it out. This past week the family removed 9 pickup beds full of junk. I helped go through the kitchen on Saturday before Uncle Sam flew in. I've never seen so many old plastic containers in my life, not good tupperware or store bought ones, but old cottage cheese, yogurt, butter, sour cream, ect. containers. We fill three large bags to recycle. Most of the house was cleaned and purged and it looks much better.

Uncle Sam came on Saturday afternoon. He brought with him a large treasure trove of genealogy information that he has been researching. While he is visiting Iowa, he plans to spend a lot of the time working with Grandma to sort her pictures and label all the family members. He has put a lot of the information on the internet so I can access the information here at home. I have a lot of information on the Smith side but not a lot on my mothers side, so this will be extremely helpful with my research. It was a very busy weekend and I loved getting to see my family.