So we were all awake till about 1:30 a.m. Friday after that accident and had to get up before 5 a.m. Saturday for Richard’s and my flight.

I went to set the long-unused alarm clock–unused because no matter how nicely loud it is for me, the bright green numbers light up the whole room. Who thought making it like that was a good idea? (Why haven’t I replaced this?)

It was dead. Great. I set my iPhone to go off next to me, knowing how tired we were, knowing I wouldn’t hear it, knowing Richard would probably sleep through it and really really not wanting to miss both our flight and Hudson’s fourth birthday.

And so I woke up at 4:15 a.m. (the third time I did) for worrying about it and called it a night.

We had so much fun playing with the grandkids. Somehow we found the energy. We sang Happy Birthday at random intervals all day and played with their toys with them and bounced on their rented bounce house (I did, anyway) and read them books and ate pizza with them and made them the center of our universe for every moment we could. We loved seeing how fantastic our son and Kim are at raising great kids. There was a party in the afternoon, their friends and Kim’s family came, and Maddy even let me push her on the swing. She is inexplicably now two.

There was an unusually late return flight available this time and we’d booked it so as to get as much time with the kids as we could. (It seems normally people want to fly TO San Diego on weekends, not away from it in the middle of one.)

Turns out there was a major league baseball game between teams there and here (and that also explains why all the airfares were so stunningly high. Who knew the airlines track the major sports games. Oh wait.)

We got home close to midnight.

We kept our eyeballs open through church (I did, anyway), came home, got just enough food down and at long last crashed like a toddler after a birthday party.

So glad we got to go.