Little Rock and Kitachi’s wedding.

I’m always behind on paper mail, so it was only three weeks ago that I opened the mail to find an invitation to Kitachi’s wedding in Little Rock. (Kitachi was one of Edda’s caregivers who worked with us for about five years – she’s the one who helped us through the pandemic and patiently walked Edda through a year of virtual school.) My first instinct, honestly, was to not go because it would be expensive and sometimes I think these things would be too much trouble to ask Jeremy to mind Edda for the weekend or just too much trouble for myself. I told Jeremy about the invitation and he said — you should go! You’ll never be invited to a party like that again. To which I said – I wanted you to tell me that I should go and then I asked him if we could all go and he smiled and said – of course! Edda needs to go! And so we found ourselves on a flight to Little Rock on Friday afternoon.

Logistics: We’ve paid extra for the PreCheck and it’s totally worth it for Edda to not take off all her shoes and getting her up and out of her chair. It’s a relief to know that we won’t be hung up at security for 15-20 minutes. We’ve also upgraded – not in the sense that we pay for seating with extra legroom or any of the extras the airlines want (we still fly the cheapest economy seats we can get), we just upgrade to fly at convienent hours. So no early mornings or late nights for us and we try to get non-stop flights. Also, I did not book a bunk bed to save $40 and we rented a car after thinking we might Uber around town. I wasn’t sure about the Uber service in Little Rock and we have a lot of stuff with us.

We picked up Edda after school on Friday and went to DCA. Our plane was boarded on time, but there was a computer glitch and the plane needed to be rebooted. They turned the plane off and waited a couple of minutes (where Edda happily yelled Baaahahhh so everyone could hear) and turned it back on and it was fine.

We got in Friday night and slept and Saturday morning, we did a walking tour around Little Rock. We saw the Heifer International Center (we’ve been donors in the past)

We walked around the Clinton Library.

Stopped off at a fancy coffee shop where they make beautiful foam art.

We saw the high school where the Little Rock Nine desegregated it in 1957 to great outcry. I wanted to see this after seeing the high school in Topeka KS that was critical in Brown vs BOE.

Then we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the partay! Edda wore a one shouldered outfit that Kitachi picked out for her for homecoming a few years ago. Jeremy and I wore the exact same outfits we wore for Sumit’s 50th birthday party about a month ago.

We were so happy and honored to be invited to this party. It was great to celebrate with Kitachi and Keyera!

I was determined to dance at this party and I did dance and have a wonderful time. There was a lot of twerking which I was trying to build up my courage to participate, I’m sure Kitachi would have done it with me, but I felt just a bit too self conscious to do it in the end.

Keyera is trying to convince me to join in more enthusiastically.

There was also a lot of complicated line dancing, here’s Keyera’s mom trying to teach me the steps. It was so much fun! So incredibly and fabulously joyful in many ways that I’m not familiar with. Jeremy was the only white guy and he dressed in a suit and looked like a banker. lol.

We flew home on Sunday during the day. Edda spent much of the time leaning up against me and rubbing her head on my shoulder and smiling. It was a great weekend – so happy we went and so happy we could go!