Tuesday's Travels

Austin and I often had a friendly banter back and forth about who had it worse in our moving arrangements: me on the plane for 6 hours with a 13 month old, 1 month old or him in the car for 4 days with a 5 year old, a dog and a cat. (My mom was with me for help, his step dad with him) Obviously we both think we have the upper hand in that argument, but let me plead my case a little bit.

Flying with kids isn't easy. First there is just the fact that you need a LOT of stuff. You need a lot for one kid, let alone 2. And when packing for a permanent move, the segregation of items between 'need immediately', 'need in Houston but can wait a week', and 'don't need until killeen' ... It becomes a daunting task to sort it and inevitably it defaults to too much being pack for the immediate trip.

Here is Yaya with our smarte (aka life saving) carte (the 'e' is necessary why??) and 2 of our carry ons. Notice the cooler in front of Yaya? Yeah...that baby was packed full of liquid gold. If you don't know what liquid gold is, ask a mom of an infant. We had 5 checked bags, or 4 plus a cooler, and 4 carry ons plus purses. 

I make traveling with 2 look stylish huh? It didn't last long, so luckily we took our pictures first thing.

I have a word of advice to anyone traveling with an infant: if it isn't too much trouble, take the baby out of the carrier before walking through the metal detector. Apparently if you have a carrier on they have to swipe your hands with some sort of wand (For what? Traces of...gun powder????) but if you just carry the baby you are free to go through as normal. Would have been good to know before I waited 15 minutes for my hand swiping.

The airport was fairly uneventful, mostly because we got to our gate 10 minutes before we lined up for boarding. You can thank our search for milk and my hand swiping for that.

Another word of advice: when coffee shops don't sell cartons of milk, ask them to warm the milk via a warm water bath rather than steaming the milk. Unless of course you already know your kid likes steamed milk, which we found out mine does not. Oops. Only way to learn that lesson is to offer said steamed milk 8 times and have it end up on every garment anyone happens to be wearing.

Our flight was scheduled to be 1 hour and 5 minutes to Vegas, then a stop but no plane change for 40 minutes, then a 3 hour flight to Houston.

What really happened was it took 1 hour 20 minutes to get to Vegas, we were then told we needed to change plans unexpectedly, an unplanned layover of 2 hours, and a 3 hour flight to Houston. No big deal.

The change of plans actually turned out to be ok. Charles wore himself out and slept almost the entirety of the second flight; he was really a dream. And of course sweet Loretta was an angel.

So - life in Texas begins! A few more key transitions to come, but we are one step closer to our new normal.