Well I guess this isn't really much of a pictorial as this is the only picture I have to commemorate yesterday's events.
This picture was taken at the baby blessing of Jon and Tina's little one Max. It is a fitting photo as I am holding a massive cup of ice and Katelyn is refusing to cooperate. I guess it was a sign of things to come.
Yesterday was a travel day. We boarded a flight to Denver at 5:15 and made it home and into bed by 2:30.
No one takes the luxury of economy class flying more for granted than people traveling without children. I remember the days when my biggest concern when boarding a plane was whether I had a pen for my crossword puzzle. Yesterday I boarded by plane apologizing as Kate kicked nearly every passenger we passed on our way to the back of the plane.
Our flight from Salt Lake City to Denver had been delayed due to poor weather conditions in Colorado and we had to run almost a mile in under fifteen minutes to catch our connections. A mile doesn't seem like it would be that difficult but when you are overweight and carrying a 25 pound child, trust me, it is.
Our saving grace on the flight to Salt Lake City had been Slim Jims. We had an entire bag full of those nasty foul smelling processed beef sticks and Kate reclined across my lap and propped her feet up on Dave's shoulder eating one after another. We had the process down to a science. One beef stick in Kate's little hand with another unwrapped at the ready and another in line after that. It occupied her for nearly an hour.
On the flight to Denver it had been those tiny Mamba candies. To make them last, I bit each little candy into six or seven pieces while Dave tried to keep Kate from flinging sticky little candies all over the place.
Because of the non existent layover, however, I didn't have time to buy more treats. We had a bottle of apple juice but the real secret of toddler air travel I have learned is tiny foods. As long as we had some sort of appealing snack that took Katelyn a million years to eat, we were fine.
One of Kate's most favorite things in the whole world is ice. She loves to crunch ice and we have never seen her turn it down. Airline ice, unfortunately, comes in giant pieces and is about as hard as I would imagine Arctic icicles to be. This meant that I was on ice crunching duty. I started by biting a piece of ice and then handing Katelyn one little bit at a time. However, this is inefficient and the second rule of toddler air travel is efficiency so I started crunching entire cup fulls of ice at once and spitting the ice back into the cup.
At first I tried to be discreet, you know, wait until no one was looking to deposit a mouthful of masticated ice chunks into a little plastic cup. Eventually though, I was mentally daring people to stare at me.
"Yeah, you're welcome for protecting your sanity by keeping her quiet."
By the time the plane landed I had crunched through five full cups of ice. Finally, we landed, deplaned, drove home, walked up the stairs, showered and bathed, and crawled into bed. I slept until noon because Dave is amazing like that.
Eventually she fell asleep for the last half hour of the flight. She was stretched out across both of our laps on her stomach with a stuffed dog for a pillow and a blanket keeping her warm. Dave and I both were frozen into contorted painful positions not daring to move for fear that she would wake up. Dave tickled her back and I rubbed her feet. We couldn't help but silently laugh to each other over our spoiled little princess. Where we once lamented about the fact that the flight attendants rarely gave us the entire can of soda during the beverage service we were now incredibly relieved that for one short moment we could sit and enjoy our flight without wrangling toddler feet.
Despite a crazy day in the air, we had such a fun time in Utah with family. We made some great memories and it is so sad to think about going back to the real world tomorrow. Why can't summer vacation last forever?
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