Monday, March 24, 2008

Baby Update!

The Space Age Grandchild is well on his or her way now. My daughter had a doctor's appointment today - she's almost 16 weeks and has lost another pound, but as she put it, is "expanding in all the right places." The baby's heartbeat was 160-ish. The old wives' tales will tell you this is a girl, but I'm an old wife, and I'm not sure I believe the tales.

This Gramma business looms ever closer. It's really a baby!

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

They say they can make dreams come true...

And maybe that's a little bit true.

We went to Disney World last week. It was a Space Age family reunion, including my parents, my siblings, and their families. I had once visited Epcot many years ago, for just a couple of hours at the tail end of a business trip. I had never explored fully, nor had I ever been where dreams are supposed to come true: the Magic Kingdom.

I'm over forty. I wondered if the magic would still work for me. It's just princesses and cartoons and silly roller coasters...or is it?

Though I will never see the Magic Kingdom as a child, I did get to experience it through the eyes of four children - two of my own, and two of my nieces. I had the once-in-a-lifetime privilege of soaring through the skies and space next to my own father, just as we might have thirty years ago when I was still just a kid.

We flew on magic carpets, roared through mountains, sang with pirates, and rocketed beyond the stratosphere. We found volcanoes and singing birds and dancing horses and glittering carriages. We walked on stones trod by millions before us, their collective history making real what our own eyes saw.

Somehow, it worked. If there is such a thing as pixie dust, it drifted above and around us for that one week. I'm left now to wonder if my original family - scattered to the winds once again, living our own lives - will ever be together in such a way. Maybe we will, and for that I can hope.

For now, I have warm and balmy memories of a few days spent suspended in a magical time warp that dissolved the barriers of time and distance. We are lucky, and even better: we know we are lucky.

Some dreams do come true.