Vegas, Baby

Tumbled into Vegas after hours in the car with the kids, and it's like going from one loud, chaotic environment into a louder, chaotic environment - even the rugs are loud in Las Vegas - bright orange, red and yellow and swirled like dead Walt Disney swallowed a bunch of quaaludes and then threw up.

My little mass of tiny people swarmed into this did I say Loud envirnoment - we blew in, fresh air into stale, fragmented, smoke-filled Golden Nugget air, loud bad music there is no place without the music, even the pool has music, the sound of people losing money everywhere disguised by happy dinging bells, everyone's faces look tight from money loss or is it no moisturizer lizard desert skin, not sure... We fight our way upstream to our room and suddenly I am enjoying a large headache and everyone is carrying giant boxes of beer on their tattooed shoulders. The kids LOVE this place, the one place louder than they are, they feel they are finally matched, Vegas is their womb.

All the mothers I spoke to before leaving gave me a list of things I HAD to do in Vegas and I take this seriously so I take the kids out to see the Strip, and every hotel is like ACRES from the other hotels, how did these people park, wade in through parking lots and casinos, cross across 70's rugs, to get to the Rain Forest Cafe? To see the lions being fed at the MGM? That was all we managed. Then the kids decided they hated walking, they love fighting, this age 9 and 10, they need to make loud noises and be sarcastic, whiney and mean, they just wanted to be back at the hotel pool, sliding down the slide through the shark tank. I found myself saying "Well what are we here for??" Then realized we weren't here to see Vegas at all. We were just here to see Poppa.

So I abandoned going out again. Well, I did manage to drag them to Circus Circus to go on the roller coasters for $26 dollars each. But each time I left our hotel there was grumbling and complaining. Finally gave up. We ate at Del Taco for $3 dollars and got a loaf of french bread and never left the Golden Nugget again. Except to cross Fremont Street and see the light show. Vegas is this horrible eye-irritant place served up to families on a tobacco cracker. I did not gamble one penny. I couldn't even sit down with the kids anywhere near a gambling facility, we just waded in and out. So no wonder I stole 3 pool towels, that was to pay back the giant black guard at the pool house door who told me I couldn't come in with my pizza after I had walked 30 blocks to find affordable lunch with the kids in tow, helfting Lilly with no stroller. That was when I first felt like crying. Always a good trip determiner. I should mention that Barry was staying with his dad the whole time, in a whole other hotel tower, we visited him, scheduled moments, like visiting the queen, but he had his own megaresponsiblity - his dad caretaker and party organizer. So I got to experience single mom-hood in Vegas, the kids and I on our own in our own room, and I would have been a terrible single mom. Let's just leave it at that. I'm way better in a team.

But Nathan and Emma got to see their cousins, and we got used to eating bread and carrots in our hotel room to save money and we got to see Poppa turn 95 years old, and we got to sit in the hot tub with 80 year old triplets (they were large) and we got to see fresh new Opper babies, and see my dad all dressed up and have one or two healthy meals and I knitted a scarf and we saw desert and we went to bed at night feeling warm because we had this big family, and Barry knows how to pull a family together and make you feel that you are part of something bigger, that you matter, in a web of things, to a handful of people that are your kin.

And we had Bruce and Nandy visit our room, Brandon and Ziani tailing along behind us to the pool, and we had Aunt Denise and Uncle Donny who stopped to eat ice cream and look at aliens with us on the deserty ride up and back, we had people who love the kids and Nathan in the car who just wanted to go back, but "only when the family is there." And Lilly who said she wanted to go home "because my tummy tells me it's time to go home." And she missed her drawers, where her clothes are, she said. Emma and Ziani wore flowers in their hair and made up a birthday dance for Poppa, and swam and swam and I got to sit next to Emma on the double upside down roller coaster. As we were going up, strapped in, no escape, we both chanted, "I changed my mind, I changed my mind, I changed my mind."

So of course back at home last night, in a quiet room, on a quiet street, with kids asleep, Vegas is throbbing in my head, but all the noise has cleared away and what's left is all solace - the pool, the familiar faces, and the shark tooth Nathan got from the shark tank divers, driving through the quiet desert with all my kids safe in the car, and there is no pile of money or giant golden nugget strapped to the top of the van, but there were all those people and Nathan reminding us, saying over and over again, like he can't help it, how much he loves knowing his family.