By Jason
The second leg of our Easter trip was to Cleveland to see my side of the family. It had been a while since Mom, Dad, and Ryan last got to see Athena in person and there were of plenty of new people for her to meet, including her great-grandmother.
We flew in just before the customary early Easter dinner. Athena by this time was an experienced flier. After a brief stop at my parents’ house we went to Gram and Aunt Linda’s to see everyone. I was a bit worried that Athena would be overwhelmed by all the people and the attention but she was fine. Here is Athena’s cousin Luke with her Uncle Ryan and Fake Aunt Laura.
Aunt Sue holds Athena while Ann examines the loot. We came home with a ton of new clothes and toys.
Gram was overjoyed to hold her great-granddaughter for the first time. I have to post these two pictures, I especially like the second where they are both smiling and looking off-frame.
After eating we did several rounds of family portraits. My Nikon D60 is nice enough that we didn’t really need to run off to a studio or hire a photographer. To be honest I’m not entirely happy with the shots – I couldn’t convince the rest of the family to wait a bit before taking their own photos, so a lot of the sunlight I was counting on was blocked and many shots have people looking in different directions.
I’ve got a bunch more family shots in the Flickr album but I had to post the four-generation shot (above) and the big group photo (below).
Athena and Luke are only a few weeks apart in age and they got along just fine.
It actually took a little while for them to both figure out there was another tiny person there. In this shot they look like they are playing together with a baby book but at this point they hadn’t really noticed each other yet.
Of course, Athena’s first reaction to anything (or anyone) novel was predictable:
In the end they did interact quite a bit. Here’s a shot where they were holding hands.
I like this picture of the three of us a lot.
In this rather goofy photo, Ron and Ann test out the hypothesis that two babies together might be as tall as my mother. Not quite, but check back in a couple months.
Later we headed back to my parents house and met up with Ryan and Jessie, who have their own baby on the way. Judging by the ultrasound, their kid may already be taller than my mom.
We got to spend some more time with Mom, Dad, Ryan and Laura the next day. Here’s the correct way to feed a baby:
Here my brother demonstrates his incorrect, cry-inducing method:
Ryan had already been in town a few days and had cleaned out the closet of our old bedroom. He found boxes with our old toys, including Transformers and various super hero action figures. It reminded me of a Christmas morning, somewhere around two decades ago. In retrospect, we had a lot of toys – though I clearly remember most of my friends having many more. I guess at that age I judged anything short of the full collection of every available Autobot as insufficient.
Spending time with Mom and Dad:
My Dad quickly figured out Athena’s sense of humor.
This is interesting, though you’ll have to click through to see the full-sized photo to read it. It looks like a note sent to my Grandmother when she was getting married. You can see that my sarcasm is clearly genetic.
Later that evening we met up with a bunch of friends at Tommy’s on Coventry in Cleveland Heights. This is our favorite restaurant, so we always make a point of visiting when we’re in town. The photo below is the result of Ann asking if someone could hand her something for Athena to play with. Clearly none of these people are responsible enough to be parents. We hung out at Jess’ place for a while afterward.
Our last day in town got off to a late start, and we didn’t leave my parents’ house to see Gram and Aunt Linda until much later than we originally planned because all three of us kept dozing. Athena took an epic, almost 4-hour nap, probably just exhausted from all the excitement. Ann was actually pretty sick and I (it turned out) was coming down with a stomach virus.
We eventually did get ourselves together and went to Mariachi Coco’s to meet up with even more friends and family. It’s getting late, so I’ll have to refer you to the Flickr page for photos (to be honest there were so many people that I didn’t get a lot of shots) but it was a great time. It’s really too bad we couldn’t stay longer and spend more time catching up.