Claire accompanied her mom to Iowa this weekend to attend a service for her late, great uncle (?) Jim, and to take part in an Alzheimer’s fundraiser walk .  Molly stayed back home with me, as she is still not quite ready for a fast-pased weekend trip, in and our of airports and hotels, like this.  And it’s a good thing she stayed home, because there were some late nights and no real nap times.  In particular, the well-planned return flight from Iowa got delayed by several hours.  Kit and Claire ended up ditching the last leg of their flight and driving home to Austin from Dallas, arriving home at 11 pm on Sunday night.  Claire was up for school at 6:30 the next morning.  That might have been sort of tough on Claire, but if Molly had been on the trip, it would have cut Sunday night’s sleep just about in half!

Anyways, I just wanted to briefly mark this trip, and the fact that Claire visited a new state, and the old family farmland in Iowa no less.  And Claire, as always, we super excited to go on a trip with her mom and fly in an airplane.  And she got to visit a butterfly house thingy.  I did not go on the trip, so I will just stick some of Kit’s pictures in here to tell the main part of the story.  (Kit and I tried on several to sit down and write this blog together, but time does not allow such frivolities.  Now I am writing it along a month later!).