Binge visiting

As Greta already mentioned, the Gutoski-James trio recently returned from a twelve-day visit to Saskatoon.  Greta's sisters Heidi and Wendy live there with their families.  Teela lives in Indiana, but she was also visiting Saskatoon at the time with her own family.  Moreover, grandpa Lee, the father of these four lovely James girls and resident of Ottawa, was also in town.  It was a big ole' James family reunion.

We stayed at Wendy's house with her family.  They were extremely accommodating and the food was always top-notch.  For the first couple nights Max slept in his playpen in the hallway adjoining the guest room (our room) with Wendy and Mike's room.  For whatever reason Max did not take well to this arrangement, so Wendy and Mike were often awakened by Max's crying in the night.  They took it like champs.  Even so, we took pity on them and moved Max into the guest room with us.  Of course, they could still hear him cry.  But the frequency of such events decreased significantly.

We visited Heidi and her family almost every day.  Max quickly learned the names of his four Saskatoon cousins: "Lee-oh-ah!" (Leora), "Aeh-weh!" (Anwyn), "Eick!" (Eric), "...." (Anthony -- I can't remember how he says that one.)  There was no shortage of great food at Heidi's place either; Gary even stepped up with a couple of his world-famous, all-out dinner parties.

The days were packed.  The activity that sticks out most in my mind at the moment is our trip to the Saskatchewan River.  We canoed out to an isolated sandbar where the girls played with Max for hours.

See how the baby ape stays close to his mother.  This rare shot of the elusive hairless pink-skinned ape with her baby was obtained only after days of waiting in a blind.  More photos at uncle Mike's photo album.

After an exhausting flight into Hamilton we returned home to find that Radka had cleaned our house from top to bottom.  The entire place was vaccuumed.  She even went into our bedroom and cleared the dresser of junk so that she could dust it.  She cooked a couple of fantastic dessert pizzas and left them for us.

Despite Radka's thorough and much-appreciated cleaning, we came home to a tri-fold infestation: the ants had returned in our basement, the fruit flies had returned in our kitchen, and the dogs had fleas.  Fruit flies and ants are no big deal.  Fleas are a whole other ballgame.

Because of the fleas, we could not go visit Gus' sister Sue and Greta's parents in Ottawa this weekend.  (Neither family was keen on inviting flea-ridden dogs into their homes.)  Unfortunately, our Ottawa plans also included Radka -- she was to spend a couple days touristing about.  Moreover, Sue and Jeff needed a babysitter for Saturday night.

Our solution was to send Radka to Ottawa alone on a bus.  She is currently touring Ottawa.  (She even went to Montreal yesterday!).  She will babysit for Sue and Jeff in our absence tonight.  Then Sue and Jeff will take her back to Waterloo when they visit tomorrow.  Quite a whirlwind.  Mean time, Greta and I are secretly grateful for the excuse to sit at home and unwind after a hectic two weeks in Saskatoon.

While visiting family like this is always fun, it's also exhausting.  Everyone's life in Saskatoon was put into temporary chaos while the visits played out.  Routines were interrupted.  Max's potty training went into relapse.  The fact that people need to travel so far for visits like this one implores guests to spend as much time with their hosts as possible during the visit.  We love that time, but it's also an overload.  (For context, consider: we'd never shack up with gramma and grampa Gutoski for twelve straight days -- they're only a ten-minute drive away!)

I can't help but think how much more we could all benefit from our families if only we could structure our lives so that we all live in the same city (or even the same street).  Of course, modern life makes that impossible.  We follow the jobs, first and foremost.  Even if you do live in the same city as a relative, it's almost impossible to get desirable real estate within walking distance of a relative.  Indeed, thanks to the dangerous highway overpass connecting us with gramma and grampa Gutoski, it's virtually impossible for us to bike there with Max even though the trip is only 30 minutes.  I wonder if there would be any positive effect if some houses were sold in bundles of, say, five, instead of the one-family one-property model we have in most of the developed world.

Yeah, yeah, leave it to Gus to find doom and gloom in a super-fun family visit.  Of course I'd do our Saskatoon visit all over again.  It was undoubtedly a positive experience.  I just find it hard not to notice the problems and think about how to solve them when they're rubbed in my face.