Travels with Toddlers

[sarahmichelef]

Went to OK for the weekend - left Friday and came back today; Mom's bday is the end of the month (and it's a Big One), so Dad threw her a big party (attended by 39 people, I think we counted) and flew greydora in as a surprise (for symmetry - we all went to NYC for Dad's Big Birthday four years ago, and Mom flew greydora in for that shindig, also as a surprise. Her travel got all mucked up, however, so there was lots of phone tag going on between the two of us as we attempted to sort out getting her from Tulsa to Stillwater when she arrived, which for a while looked like it might be in the middle of the party. Fortunately her ride was willing to kill time in Tulsa until she arrived. Mom did find out that she was coming, though, because greydora called my cell while I was in the shower and Mom saw her name on the caller ID and answered. When the first words out of her mouth were "Let me talk to Dad" (on my cell phone?), Mom caught on. Ah well... she was still surprised & happy, which was kinda the point.

United had some drama Thursday evening that had spilled over into Friday morning, so our flight was an hour & a half late leaving. No big, we had 3 hours in ORD anyway, but we had to stand in line at BUF forever before they decided to let people who DIDN'T need to be rebooked because they were going to miss their connections check in at the skycap. In general, TRex traveled well, but one set of hands for 2 people's worth of carryon luggage is a major pain in the ass, especially when one of the things you have to carry is a carseat that doesn't actually fit down the aisle of the commuter jets. (Incidentally, given the choice between a Canadair commuter jet and an Embraer commuter jet, take the Embraer. It's a much nicer plane!) We muddled through thanks to the frontpack. She realy liked the neon sculpture in the pedestrian tunnel that connects the United terminals at ORD. On the way home today she fought sleep more successfully than I've ever seen her do - she fell asleep 10 minutes before we landed in ORD and woke up when I transferred her from her carseat to the frontpack, and then on the second flight she fell asleep AFTER WE'D LANDED and managed to sleep until we got to the car.

OK is still OKish... we went swimming, visiting at various offices, shopping, to the park. Got to break out our summer clothes, too - it was in the mid-80s on Sunday! TRex adores the cats - she'd let out a high pitched "Hi!" and wave every time she saw one of them. Eventually she even got brave enough to touch them, and they thankfully didn't lash out at her when she got too enthusastic in her attentions. (Hey, they're 16 and 14 year old - and one of them is completely blind - so I wasn't sure HOW they'd react to her.) Shockingly, it was Freckles, the older and more temperamental of the two (he's a mean little SOB, although greydora will argue that "he's my sweet kittycat!") who had the most patience for her - in part because he's very smart and figured out pretty much immediately that the strange, shrill, miniature human tended to throw food on the floor during meals. I think Patriot's problem was just that he couldn't SEE her and so didn't know that she was just a strange miniature human and really mostly harmless.

I think that even M would say that he got the short end of the stick on this trip (he makes lots of noise about hating to go to OK, and on this trip we didn't even go to Eskimo Joe's). He was the one stuck at home in the house with water backing up into the basement. Got the immediate problem dealt with on Friday night, but we're still drying out and we're going to have to replace all of the carpet in the basement. Oy. So we're going carpet shopping tomorrow afternoon. Doubleoy. There goes the money we were going to use for living room furniture.

So I'm not going to even attempt to read what y'all people have been talking about for the past five days. If there's anything vital to my continued existence, gimme the Cliff Notes version.

Comments

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

Northern Lights happened. Peregrine got 2nd in Pent, and won a bunch of catagories, and I won in leatherworking.

And I made candy. it's very frantic.

That's the important stuff.

[alphasarah.livejournal.com]

Whoohoo to both of you!

You were making a brittle, yes? Brittles stress me out. Boiling sugar + soda! Ack! Workfaststirstirstirspreadbreathe.

[rufinia.livejournal.com]

It's boiling sugar and egg.

So it's Look at recipie, wonder if the amount of water was written down right, shrug, boil, add five time the amount of sugar to the water, boiler, stir, realize that OMG you need to whip the egg, but first you need to seperate it, whip egg, whip whip whip, put in candy thermometer, whip whip whip, syrup gets to proper temp, add syrup to egg, stir stir stir, realize that maybe opening the bag of pine nuts would have been a good idea before starting this mess, stir, open pine nuts, pour pine nuts in stir, stir, realize that a bigger bowl would have been good, stir, pourspreadfalloverdie.