Three weeks and 12 plus hours later and we’re back home in Vermont. The travel part of the trip was only to be expected. It’s a cross country flight. What else could be expected? All in all, in flight, I tried to keep the focus that my relationship with my kids was going to vastly outlive the relationship with any seat mates or evil eyes.
San Francisco had a play area (tubes for crawling through and other cool things) at our gate. The kids got to play there and giggle, wiggle and relax before we got on board our long flight. Thanks SFO!
If someone were to ask me if it’s worth it to fly long distance, I’d have to say that as long as the stay there were long, then it is definitely worth the stress of flying with two kids. Even alone I’d do it again, knowing what I know now. It’s tricky but so is staying home (or putting kids in daycare, for that matter). It’s part of the mothering package.
I’ve got about 300 photos that I need to sift through and put up on flickr or facebook or something.
We got home past midnight with the kids fast asleep in their carseats. One carseat was borrowed from the airport since ours got lost along the way. We all got in bed and I slipped out to take a relaxing bath. I was still wired from theĀ adrenalineĀ of the trip and the glee at seeing my sweet husband. Regardless, I fell asleep pretty quickly.
We woke up this morning at around 11am. It’s been only a couple of hours but I think we’re all getting tired again. I’m guessing we’ll be off for about a week. Up until midnight and awake mid-morning. Don’t know who we’ll be able to see with this schedule but I’m comforted to know that it’ll all return to an eastern standard time normal in a bit.
I finished a couple of projects while in California. One was a Violet dress for bilingual baby. She likes the Violet character from Peanuts and has been asking for a green dress, like Violet’s, for several months. Well, she has one now. Photos to come.
Baby brother changed a lot in 3 weeks. He picked up speed running, learned how to climb, how to slide down the stairs, climb stairs standing, and how to drink from a cup. He’s wanting to jump so badly and once he learns how to, I can’t imagine why he’d want to walk anywhere. His hair grew and I gave him a quick trim before we left California.
He called my mom (Nonita) mama, which tickled her to no end. My nephew called her Nonamom at one point and now she’s adopting mamanona, as well.
He can’t sit still, but why should he? My family knows of my homeschooling intentions and once my mom got to hang with my kids for 3 weeks, agreed that they’d really shine as homeschoolers.
We did take off with some really cool books in Spanish.
One reason for clearing my parents of their Spanish books was to support a new endeavor I’m starting up: a Spanish playgroup class. The way I envision the playgroup, we would start with songs together, a couple of stories together, then some one on one reading between the parent and child and then some games, or parallel play, depending on the age.
I’m excited to get into this sort of thing. I had been wondering how we would get something like this started and it just happened. There’s another woman who will be heading up another group during the week, but I chose a weekend so bilingual papi could also participate.
My brain is powering down so I’ll come back to share some more California stories.