Hi S,

I hope you had a good weekend.

I have been trying to get a hold of D for almost a week now, T and I are ready to make reservations at the campground and need to nail down the dates we have in mind with her.

I am concerned about the campground booking up for that week and I feel like I need to nail this down. I am a planner and I don’t like not having concrete details. We are planning on leaving 4 weeks from today. I want to check in on the 18th and out on the 22nd. But again, I don’t want to make reservations if she thinks that might be too long of a visit. I also don’t want to make it too short and I get overwhelmed with meeting so many people in too short of time. I want to be able to take an hour or two to myself every day so that I can process my feelings and thoughts.

Do you know how D is feeling about all of this? Does she have anyone to help her through this? I can only imagine how this might be hard for her, or how this might be bringing up old struggles and memories. I don’t want to make it any more difficult on her than it has to be or should be.

Are you comfortable or do you think it might help her for you to give her a call? I don’t know what your relationship is like I and the last thing I want is for you two to have a strained relationship just because I’m asking for insight. I also don’t want her to feel like I’ve gone behind her back or over her head. I just have no way to know how she is doing with this whole thing.

Any suggestions?

(emailed to D's older sister)

I have several fragments of thoughts regarding my feelings about my upcoming trip. TONS of what if’s have run through my brain; what if it doesn’t go well, what if we don’t get along, what if I get along with some of her other family members better, what if her boys resent me, what if she regrets her decision, I cant afford the trip, the bugs are bad, we get a flat tire, we have nothing to say to each other… the list goes on and on.

The feeling of not having any control of how the week will go has me obsessing about things that really are rather small in the grand scheme of things. Like; the route we will take to get there, what hotel we might stay at on the way, exactly what time we will leave home, when I will bring my dog to ‘grandma camp’. I feel like I need all of the logistical things worked out.

I have decided that we will be staying a bit longer than I had originally thought. I'm thinking that we will leave on Sunday, stay within 2 hours or so from our final destination. That way I can get a good nights sleep and shower before The Meeting. I have not talked with her about it yet, but I'm hoping we can meet Monday morning for breakfast, just the three or four of us (me, T, D and D’s boyfriend). Then from there we can check into the campground, set up and spend the day as just the four of us. This way we have a day together before she takes me on, what I expect to be a tour of the family.
By getting there on Monday, I hope to not have to meet large groups of the family all in one day, hopefully we can spread it out a bit over Tuesday and Wednesday so that on Thursday, my birthday, whoever comes out for dinner I will have already met.