Nebraska: Saturday

On Saturday morning, we met up at my grandparents' for doughnuts and then headed over to Speedway Motors Museum.

Margaret head a headache, so I dropped off the rest of the gang at the museum and took three kids to Walgreen's to buy Advil. (I had even packed general medications, but they were back at the hotel room when they should have been in my purse.) While there, I parallel parked a 15-passenger van downtown, which made me feel like the equivalent of James Bond.

My children had never used a parking meter, and Thomas got to put in the quarters, so it was all grand fun.

I have about one hundred photos from the car museum, all taken by the children of the various displays. I don't know what all the cars were, but they were very impressive, I'm sure! My 11-year-old told me so many details, I could not keep track, but there were very special cars there, like one car that is the only one ever made and is worth something like one million dollars.

As if one car museum were not enough BOY JOY for one day, next we went to the private auto collection owned by my grandpa's great buddy, asphalt entrepreneur, and spry nonagenarian, Mr. Cather. (For my literary friends, yes, this Mr. Cather from Lincoln, Nebraska, is a fairly close relative of author Willa Cather.)

Mr. Cather animatedly giving us a tour

He owns a couple of dozen fabulous old automobiles and generously let our children climb into all of them and open and close doors. It was good I did not find out until later that one car, for example, was worth $250,000!

Thomas (3) asked for a broom so we let him sweep in a corner and avoid damaging anything.

More adventures awaited us after what was already a very long day of visiting two museums. My sweet Mary had developed the most strange internal ear infection--in the absence of any illness, respiratory or otherwise--in the days before our travel. Our family must have great Eustachian tubes, as among six children in a dozen years, I think we've experienced in total three ear infections, and my inclination is to let them go and not even treat with antibiotics (statistically, studies show that three-quarters of kids' immune systems will resolve an internal, bacterial ear infection within a week without any antibiotics). However, knowing we'd be flying, I had taken her to the doctor for antibiotics in hopes of reducing the pain in the 24 hours before she'd be experiencing air pressure changes on the airplane. Still, her infection was becoming more acute and painful even 48 hours after starting oral antibiotics, so I sent Chris back to the hotel to help the little boys take a nap, and I took Mary and three others to a CVS Minute Clinic where the doctor saw that it was significantly worse. That turned out to be a two-hour misadventure involving an insurance snafu, and Mary was given an additional prescription of topical antibiotic and steroid. Still, with two prescriptions and continuous Advil, her pain plagued her for the whole weekend.

Back at the hotel, the boys napped, and then dipped toes in the pool, and were quite refreshed when my crew arrived bedraggled and bickering back to retrieve them and head back to see the grandparents for dinner.

Running in the gully behind their grandparents' home

My grandfather had set aside for me a cigar box of old photos from his childhood and my (deceased) mother's childhood, and I greatly enjoyed his showing them to me and my hearing so many stories of old times. These are treasured moments with family.

Grandpa still has his humor and likes to josh around . . .

Playing Matchbox cars on the patio

It was a long, good day!