Wisconsin Vacation Day 1: It's Pronounced "Airmane"

Aaand, we’re back from beautiful Wisconsin!

I wanted to post earlier about our trip, but thought this would be a better option—write the posts as we go and rain down entries once we return home.

"Rain dance!"

So here it is, friends, an account of our much-anticipated visit to WI to see Jon during his away rotation:   

I set two alarms the night before our flight to be sure that D and I would get out of the house in time to make our flight.  TWO.  ALARMS.  I had two weeks of less than ideal sleep under my belt, so I knew, subconsciously, that my first instinct would be to non-maliciously sabotage our trip by sleepily silencing my alarm in order to consume more Z’s. 

That is exactly what happened.

Self aware?  Yes.  Helpful?  No.

I flew out of bed at 3:30am (half an hour late), knowing that I had 20 minutes to:

                          a)   get myself ready

                          b)   get David ready

                          c)    load our bags and D into the car

As you can imagine, D was completely discombobulated.  I gave him some milk as I changed his diaper and wrestled his clothes on, explaining, through his sleep tantrum, that we were leaving on an adventure to see daddy.  Read in wonder voice, “David P, we’re going to get on an airplane to go see daddy in Wisconsin!”  D was not amused and only managed to cry, “airmaaaaaaaane,” sadly in between slugs of milk.  “Yes baby, I know it’s early, but we’re going to have such a fun day today.  And we get to see daddy in just a few hours.”

If you’ve ever traveled with children, alone or otherwise, in an airport, I think you’ll agree that it requires the same amount of strength and stamina required to execute the “cliffs of insanity” scene from the Princess Bride:

In spite of tired airport arms, D traveled like a total champ.  We had two flights, both relatively short, and he did really, really well.  Only a couple moments of temporary fussing which were quelled by snacks, toys or iPad. 

In between flights, we rode the people movers, looked out the windows at the big airplanes and ate expensive airport food.  In spite of our late start, I couldn’t have asked for a better trip.

And then we landed in Madison, came down the escalators to baggage claim, and saw daddy waiting at the bottom of the stairs for us.  David, with his hawk eyes, spotted him, pointed and yelled, “DADDY!!!!”  He wanted to run down the escalator to get to him, it was so sweet.  So I let him down and he ran up to Jon and gave him a giant hug, then asked to be picked up.  And they mirthed out.

The rest of the day was spent getting supplies at Target and eating dinner at Noodles and Company, a place we discovered on the East Coast that doesn’t exist in the South.  D was exhausted, and he would have gone to bed without any issues, but there were two confounding factors to face:

                          1.     It’s hard for a little, curious person to fall asleep in a strange new place with strange,       new things to look at, and

                          2.     The devil skylight in the ceiling that poured light into the loft area where D’s pack-n-play was until 9:00pm.  We strategized the following day about how to fix this (the best we could come up with was a curtain to block out some of the light).

So that was day one, in a nutshell.  Long day, but very, very good.  I can’t tell you how great it was to see Jon after not seeing him for two weeks.