A Weekend in Midwest Utopia

1. In about 20 hours, we managed to hit three of my favorite eateries in Grad School Town, including burritos (the best EVER) for dinner and chocolate mousse for dessert (LG's pick; I'm waiting for her to get sick from the dairy). LG had a huge bacon omelet for breakfast (yes, that would be just egg with bacon stuffed inside it) and I had homemade granola, with fruit and yogurt and more fully caffeinated coffee than I've had in months.
2. LG quite enjoyed looking for open buildings on Sunday morning (she was lucky in that it was freshman orientation, so campus was pretty active).
3. LG swam in the pool, which was small enough that I felt comfortable NOT swimming in the pool, but sitting in a lounge chair in my bathing suit. (Coincidentally, LG passed her latest swim test on Saturday and is now in "Level 3," the holy grail of swimming lessons, in which students are actually asked to go in the deep end. Oh, if she could only actually swim.)
4. I still think Grad School Town is one of the most beautiful campuses nationwide. I can actually come up with only one I like better (that would be Cornell). It's gotten a little more swank since I graduated (including the hotel we stayed at) but it never ceases to make me cry. My last year in grad school was pretty rough, what with trying to get a job and my grandmother dying and me desperately wanting to get pregnant, and I don't think I fully appreciated GST until I left. If a job in my field opened up, I would apply there in a heartbeat. I said to LG, upon entering campus, do you know where we are? To which she replied, THE UNIVERSITY, completely awestruck, as if she didn't live a mile from a university campus.
5. One of the added bonuses of Grad School Town is the relative lack of pregnant women and new babies (something I was well aware of when I lived there, as well). But we accidentally walked past a Children's Boutique (new) and it hit me, well, hard. You can't really leave pregnancy loss home when you go on vacation, apparently.
6. All that aside, it's really not worth putting a 5-year-old in the car for 10 hours for any of the above, although when I told LG that Grad School Town was one of my favorite places in the whole world she said, I know, Mom. You got so happy when you saw it. Maybe that's worth it after all.