Hey From Indiana

Where do I begin? It's been a busy past few days and there is a lot to report on, but I'll start with the whole purpose of this trip: the baptism of Anna and Alexander, which happened yesterday and went very smoothly. Here are photos from the church with the children in their finest white. My father, Bobby, flew in from Mississippi and Mikel's sister, Maureen, and nieces, Megan and Rachel, surprised us by driving down from Detroit. The children behaved pretty well throughout the service and didn't cry at all during the baptism. Pastor Terry asked Alexander afterward, "That wasn't too bad was it?" And Alexander said, "Not bad." After the service our family, as well as the pastor and his wife and some other friends from church went out to eat.

We left our home Thursday and spent 12 hours in the car, the first 6 of which was during pretty severe rain and winds. With all three of our pieces of luggage on the roof of our vehicle! Once we stopped for the night, it came an even worse downpour (with one piece of luggage remaining on top during the night). Thankfully, only some clothes were damp. The hotel has a washer and dryer for guests, and I took advantage of it.

The next day we drove for almost 6 hours before checking in to the hotel and meeting with our pastor.

Saturday afternoon we went to the Indiana Dunes beach along Lake Michigan, and the children got to play in the ultimate sandbox while Mikel got to play beach volleyball with some old buddies. The water was pretty darn cold so the children didn't do much more than wade, and that was fine with me since the rip currents here can be strong and you could see where the depth quickly dropped. Later the whole family had arrived and we all went out to eat and then came back to swim in the indoor pool. Oh, by the way, the children have learned how to swim on their own this trip! Sort of. With their inflatable arm wing things they can doggie paddle and not drown! That's a start, anyway. Of course, we would never leave them alone or turn our backs on them.

Sunday was church and a long lunch. Later we went over to our pastor's home for several hours for dinner. We showed them our adoption video and we all just visited for a while.

This morning we took the South Shore commuter train into Chicago. We took Anna to the American Girl Place (over-the-top doll store) and I searched around for a replacement for my glass-blown Water Tower Christmas ornament which got broken in our move from New York. Then we had lunch at Gino's East pizza and took my Dad to the Blue Line stop so he could make his way back to O'Hare. After waving good-bye to Dad we went to Millennium Park and let the children stick their feet in this water fountain thingy and took some photos at this gigantic reflective spaceship looking thingy before boarding the train back to Northwest Indiana.

Then probably the most random thing so far happened. We were sitting on the 3:58 p.m. train waiting for it to shove off when a woman behind me said "Fran?" I turned around and it was Quyen, one of our friends and among this blog's most faithful readers! Hey, Quyen! Quyen is among a few other friends I've e-mailed trying to figure out how we could get together so we could meet each other's kids. How bizarre that we would run into each other on the same train. How many million people live in this city? Not only could she have boarded one of many other cars on this long train but she could have sat at the opposite end of the car we were all on and we'd probably not have seen each other. As it turned out I think she recognized my voice. She was getting off work in downtown Chicago and heading back home herself. We're still trying to get together to have the children meet but our options now to meet up with people are falling to next weekend. I knew this weekend was going to be tough with our families in town and the service.

Anyway, tomorrow we head to Detroit for a few days to visit with Mikel's family.