Boiled Peanuts

My daughter is now at my parent's house for a few days.   My husband drove her up this morning after being woken up by her, letting us know it was time to get up and go.   My mother has been preparing and one of the things she wanted to do was send back something for my son and me.   

She kept saying she had something for me that was a surprise.  I jokingly said it had better not be a fruit cake.   So when my husband got home and told me he had some boiled peanuts for me from my mother, I was very excited. 

They might sound terrible, but they're actually sort of like peanut-flavored salty beans.   I grew up eating them from roadside stands on the road as we headed to Georgia to visit my grandparents with my mother.  Sometimes the group traveling down would be my mother, aunt, and cousin Rebecca.   Those were good times.  

We would sing songs, Rebecca and I would play games in the back seat and ask how much longer until we'd get there.   We would have to go to the bathroom and say we couldn't wait.   They would let us know they could pull off the side of the highway and we could go with the door open if we couldn't hold it until the next stop.  

I often wondered if that was a threat because they didn't want to be stopping every hour at our whim just because we were antsy and wanted to get out of the car.  

Those trips are good memories and the flavor of boiled peanuts always brings back thoughts of my childhood.  

Thanks for the peanuts, Mom.

The Big Boy Update:  My son and I had a good day together today.   Tonight, perhaps because his sister wasn't upstairs in bed in her room, he came back down and said he was scared.   He watched us putting a video up for Filament Stories for a while and then said he was tired and headed off to bed by himself.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wanted to listen to the movie Luca, that she recently "watched" with her father.   He turned on the movie, enabled audio descriptions, and let it play as they headed to the mountains.   She listened to the movie not once, but twice on the way there.