We flew Southwest to West Chester Saturday morning, arriving in time for lunch (with milkshakes!) at Ruby's Diner, conveniently located in the upscale strip mall 1 mile from my in-laws' house. [And can I mention here that they bought coordinating hot pink car seats for the kids so that we didn't have to lug them along? Such a luxury!]While A napped, my MIL took me and Z to the local mall ("It's in Delaware, a different state!" Z exclaimed) for new shoes. Although the old-school children's shoe boat Shirley wanted to take us to was shuttered for good, we found a ghetto fabulous Kids Foot Locker selling Converse sneakers, which was what we wanted anyway. Z picked out these cool kicks and Shirley wisely bought A a matching pair.
On Sunday Josh and I left the girls with their grandparents and caught a matinee of Hot Tub Time Machine, which is as dumb as it sounds, but I still enjoyed it. [Incidentally, my favorite joke was from one of the previews, when a send up of McGyver confesses to leaving an "upper decker" in the captain's quarters. An upper-decker being a shit in the toilet tank, not the bowl. Yes, I have the world's most juvenile sense of humor. Tears are spilling down my cheeks as I type this.]
Ahem. After the movie, we took Z and A off Shirley and Joel's hands for a little while, driving to a nearby playground. (You can't walk to anything from their place.) It was cool, damp and windy, but the kids had a blast anyway.
On Monday Shirley had a ton of cooking to do for the seder, so Josh and I drove the girls into the city (the long, long way thanks to screwy GPS directions) to meet his high school friend Erica and 2 of her 3 kids at the amazing Please Touch museum. Thank you to all my Twitter followers who recommended it, it was as great as you promised. So appealing to kids, in fact, that we lost our wandering 2 year old twice. (Both times I found her within 5 minutes, hanging out with a uniformed employee.)
Finally, late Monday afternoon, people started arriving for the Passover seder. Josh's aunt and uncle, his dad's cousin and her husband and his cousin and her family were all in attendance, but the only cousins who counted to Z and A were the two other kids, 6 year old Daniel and 4 year old Jessica. Aside from A, who missed her nap, the kids were fairly well behaved. A and Z wouldn't eat matzo, parsley or maror, but they did dig into the matzo ball soup with gusto.
Dinner conversation was a little too politically charged for my taste (although it might have been made more pleasant had we be drinking something other than sweet Manischewitz). I always forget that my father-in-law, his brother and his brother's wife are really right of center, so I found myself defending health care reform and mocking birthers and tea party haters to people who responded with "I don't personally know anyone who doesn't have health insurance" and "If Obama's birth certificate is authentic, why was there any question about it's authenticity?" Yeah, and there are anti-Semites who deny the Holocaust too, but we don't give them their own cable news channel.
