Tucson

On June 17th we left for a 5 day trip to Tucson where Bryan and I attended the RF Symposium for work. We thought that the day of flying would be difficult, but it was even harder than we expected. Jill is a great sleeper and napper, but while some parents have the problem that their children can't go to sleep without their soothing, Jill can't go to sleep unless she is alone. This made for a long day.

Jill still naps twice a day. She wakes at 7:00AM, is ready for a 1.5 hour nap at 9:30AM, and then takes another nap at 2:30PM before retiring for the night at 7:00PM. On the day of our flight we woke her early at 6:00AM. She then skipped both naps because she couldn't settle down on the plane and finally fell asleep on the way to our hotel in Tucson around 8:00PM EST. So this little girl who usually is hard pressed to stay conscious for 3 hours in a row was up for 14 hours straight. That's just a little something to set the stage.

Bryan and I prepared for the flight like we were preparing for battle. I remember reading in a humorous newspaper column a few years ago that you need a new activity approximately every 5 seconds that you have a baby on a plane. So to endure a 4 hour flight you need approximately 2880 planned activities. We took that advice to heart. Our carry ons consisted of a cooler with Jill's snacks and a big duffle bag full of her toys and books. And of course we had her diaper bag with several changes of clothes, too.

Our seats were in the first row in economy on both flights (we had a connection in Phoenix) so that gave us a little extra room on the floor in front of us for Jill to play. She played pretty well for a while but very soon the books that she had happily flipped through for 30 minutes at a time the day before became annoyances and projectiles. About 45 minutes into our first flight we had burned through our duffle bag of fun and we had to improvise. We had a little bit of luck when Jill played with a ripped granola bar wrapper for 40 minutes (crinkle crinkle crinkle, put the wrapper pieces together, crinkle crinkle crinkle move the pieces apart) but otherwise we sang to her, fed her, and walked her the entire time to keep the peace. She never really lost her cool but would let out these long yells of protest to let us know that she was NOT happy while the people near us looked around nervously.

By the time we landed in Phoenix we had all had enough. The wear was visible on Jill's face. Her face was sticky, her hair messy, her hands and knees dirty from crawling around, her little eyelids were drooping--but still she would not sleep. We still had an hour layover and another short flight to go and at this point I was thinking that the trip was not worth this torture!

But to make a long story short (I know it's too late for that already! Ha!) we made it. Jill never really melted down and appreciated all over again what a good girl she is.

I was pretty good myself, I only melted once and elbowed Bryan when he didn't hand me the Cheerios fast enough. Groan.

Other than that we had a good trip. We had a suite with a kitchenette so that we could prepare Jill's food and keep her in a separate room at night. She did pretty well in the restaurants and really loved playing peak a boo with her Dad when he was trying to follow up on work phone calls on our patio.



We also had a memorable run in with a duck during the company barbecue. He chased Jill around the lawn for a while until she turned the tables and chased him.