Your average travelers stay in hotels on vacation, but when my family visits my grandmother, we check into a retirement home rather than the local Holiday Inn.  My grandmother lives in a small apartment in a retirement community, so instead of cramming a family of four into her den, she puts us up in the building's guest suite, which is available to visiting friends and family. 

Staying in a retirement home is amusing - the bulletin board outside the dining room posted used scooters for sale, Bridge sign-ups and a notice about the refurbishing the shuffle board courts - but the situation has its perks.  We don't have to cook or even go out to eat since we can join my grandmother for meals in the dining room.  But the first seating for dinner is at 4:30 p.m.  And meal times are big there and folks like to show up early to guarantee a good table.  I shouldn't poke fun since the early dinner hour actually works well for Oliver and Soren, so we eagerly arrived early for dinner too. 

If you bring little kids to a retirement home, I learned you need to accept that it takes longer to go anywhere in the building since every little old lady (and man too) will stop to talk to your children.  But they always say how cute and well-behaved they are, even if they had just screamed their way through dinner.  So when a crowd of old folks stopped me to admire Soren after dinner one evening, I unbuckled him from his stroller, put him on the floor and let him crawl around and show off his cuteness.  He was the highlight of the evening and by extension, my grandmother got extra attention too. 

Chris is a good sport about our overnight stays at my grandmother's retirement home.  And a good thing, because once after an evening of my grandmother's story-telling, he commented how he'd gotten a glimpse of his wife in 60 years.  Yup, just like my grandmother, I'll be talking too loudly about my fellow residents, because "they're old and can't hear anyway," spending my evenings at the puzzle table and zipping by the scooter riders as they jokingly holler to me to slow down, to my annoyance.