Afrogeeks on the Road #2

We spent the weekend in Baton Rouge visiting with my sister and my in-laws. My sister, an LSU alum and crazy avid fan on LSU athletics, is already trying to recruit Frances to play soccer at LSU. My brother-in-law, a Southern alum and member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, was trying to bring her on a tour of Southern University.

Here are some people we visited with:

Here is my grandfather, Wilton, who told us happily that he is "free, single, and disengaged." He is our pecan candy (aka pralines) hook up when we are in Louisiana.

This is my niece Morgan. My sister is probably mortified that I sharing the picture of Morgan before she got her hair combed, but I think she looks cute. She's two, 6 months younger than Cate. She's getting a new sibling in February. Her vocabulary is blissfully free of the profanity that my own two year old spouts frequently.



And this is Gerald, Brian's brother, Nikki and Bryce. We are out to dinner at Copeland's and had the most delicious red beans and rice, pecan encrusted catfish, and other yummy food. A good time was had by all.

Afrogeeks on the Road

Greetings from sunny (and humid!) Louisiana. The family and I have made our way from Charleston to Louisiana by train (a trip that started at 5am and eneded at 8:30pm). Here are some highlights from that trip:

--The train is surprisingly cold. We didn't have blankets (apparently everyone got that memo but us) and the people on the train didn't turn up the temptarure until about 6pm. It was fairly miserable for a time.

--Brian, unsurprisingly, made several pals on the train, including a lady who was tres impressed that Brian was actually doing hands-on parenting with the girls, and a guy with whom Brian traded, off-color, wholly inappropriate jokes.

--Advertisers haven't discovered trains and train routes. There was a surprising lack of ads during this trip.

--We discovered this about our children: Frances is an excellent traveler. She asked questions of the conductor, wrote in her journal, watched some movies, took a nap, played 20 questions, and held up remarkably well.

Cate, on the other hand, is every nightmare toddler scenario rolled into one kid. She yelled "What the fuck!" at the top of her lungs because she was tired of us telling her she couldn't go racing down the aisle. She spent the last 4 or so hours of the trip in nothing but a diaper. She eventually took a really long nap and we discovered finally that she would sit still if she was allowed to listen to music on Frances's cd player by herself. Here's a picture of her curled up and sleeping.