Trip to Indiana

I went to visit my sister and her family in Indiana over the long Columbus Day weekend. It was so much fun. Her husband is in grad school at Notre Dame and they have two little ones--a 3 year old boy and a 1 year old girl. Due to my sister's concerns for privacy and safety, I won't be posting pictures of my niece and nephew. You'll just have to take my word for it that they are adorable.

I gave my nephew a car and truck puzzle for his birthday--he loves his birthday "president". Jiggity-jiggity-jog, being read to, and playing cars and puzzles are some of this favorite things to do. My niece was fascinated by my jewelry. She always wanted to wear my bracelets and necklaces. When she found out I was wearing earrings, she would touch first one earring, then swivel over to the other ear to touch the other, and then back again to the first earring. Whenever I opened my bag, she stopped whatever she was doing and made a beeline over, determined not to miss anything fun that might come out of that bag.

My sister and I took a day to ourselves and went to Fort Wayne to check out the Allen County Public Library, with a large genealogy section. It's the 3rd largest genealogy library in the US. Having been to the other two (the Family History Library in Salt Lake and NEHGS in Boston), the Fort Wayne Library seemed a bit small. But for a public library, it's quite large. The library was beautiful and everyone was very friendly and helpful. After checking out what they had, my sister and I headed to Olive Garden for lunch. With a 4 hour round-trip drive, we had a lot of time to catch up and talk.

They also finangled tickets for me to a Notre Dame Game--part of an early Christmas present. We all went up to a tailgate party sponsored by my bro-in-law's grad school department. On the way we passed the football team entering the Basilica for Mass prior to the game. They were all dressed up in suits.


After the tailgate, my bro-in-law and I headed to the game. Notre Dame is full of traditions. One of them is to have everyone in the student section stand every second of the entire game--I'm way too old for that! Surprisingly though, my legs were fine the next day. The game was a lot of fun, esp. b/c Notre Dame won.

I had so much fun with them this weekend--glad I made the trek even though I hate flying. I used all that airplane time to read about 300 pages for my class.