Car rides and fever and fun - oh my!

We're back from our trip, safe and sound and happy. Well, the happy part might be relative at this point ... Maggie developed a low-grade fever the first night we were there, and that pendulum has swung from 100.5 to 103.2 ever since. It's weird -- she's perky and mostly herself 90% of the time, but then she just crashes. She's napped every day since Saturday, and most of you know how truly rare that is. She's also coughing up a blue streak, so I called her dr. en route today and made an appt. for tomorrow morning.

The trip was nice. Maggie did amazingly well in the car -- it was a 9-10 hour trip, depending on how many potty breaks she required, and not once did we have to break out the DVD player. Big thanks to Grandma's Bag of Tricks; you'd be amazed at the simple things that kept her occupied for long stretches of time. My aunt is retiring (tomorrow's her last day, actually) from the FBI after 30 years, and they gave her quite the sendoff. There was at least an hour's worth of presentations during her reception, and it was neat to see the people she's touched during her work with "the Bureau," as they all call it. Maggie did great during the reception too; she got a little bored toward the end, so I took her out and let her run up and down the hallway, all the while wondering in the back of my mind if we'd be arrested -- or at a minimum reprimanded -- for roaming the halls of the FBI without a chaperone. (As visitors, we had to wear these big badges that said "Escort Required.")

My aunt has -- dare I say it? -- close to 40 cats, though some of these are ferals (wild) who live in a shed toward the end of her property. Maggie had a blast learning all their names and then giving them all nicknames, which in most cases resembled the names of her own cats. She was especially enamoured with Percy (probably because we have a Purrcy at home) and Ollie. She wanted to bring four home with us; luckily we didn't have room in our car for four cat carriers. Yeah ... no room in the car ... that's the ticket.

Other highlights:

• My big girl figuring out how to pronounce the 'th' sound correctly. No more "fumpkin" or "fank you." :( I'm so not happy about this. Maggie, on the other hand, is thrilled with herself and makes a hugely deliberate point of saying THUH - umpkin or thuh-anks, adding an extra syllable to any 'th' word.
• Watching the red Sunfire play chicken with the Culligan water truck somewhere around the TN-VA border.
• Seeing how quickly Maggie warmed up to my aunt and uncle, and all my aunt's co-workers.
• Maggie jumping in front of the camera and making cheesy faces every time we tried taking pictures of the presentations at Jane's reception. Yes, this is the same child who hides whenever I point my camera at her.
• Maggie waiting a grand total of 19 minutes into the trip to ask, "Are we there yet?" (On the return trip, she beat her record and only waited 11 minutes.) She continued to ask this approximately 14 times per hour.

I know there's more, but I can't think of them right now. Of course I forgot my camera, so I'll have to rely on my mom and my aunt to send me some pictures from the trip. Right now, I'm more focused on eating a small dish of mint chocolate chip ice cream and then sleeping in my own bed! Ahh, the little things ...