Now, we were extremely tentative about the flight on Thursday – me getting down right sick to my stomach about it, particularly because as we were sitting in the SLC airport waiting to leave, we discovered much to our dismay that our baby was going to be the only child under 4 years of age on the entire flight. That was terrifying! Everyone would blame our baby for the bad flight, right? Elliott did wonderfully on the flight, sleeping for about half and playing the other half, and he found the flight safety instructions and barf bag to be extremely entertaining.
Luckily, it wasn’t us that caused the disturbance on the plane.
That was caused by a crazy woman from Boise, Idaho. She sat in front of us and brought her own oxygen tank (note: she didn’t need oxygen the entire flight, I was watching) because the air on the plane wasn’t enough. Just as our boarding was finished, this woman’s tank started to make a screeching fire alarm sort of noise. The battery was dead, no o2 was flowing and we couldn’t take off until the flight attendants could turn this woman’s defective machine off. They ended up taking it off the plane, taking the battery out, giving the woman Delta airlines air, “just in case”, and 45 minutes later, we got to go and get de-iced. In the end, our 3 hr 35 min. flight took an extra hour and a half, but we made it to Philly in the middle of the night.
By the time we got to Craig and Christina’s house, our gracious hosts stayed up patiently waiting for our arrival, Elliott was wired, the dogs were nuts, and we knew it was going to be a long night. It was. We finally got Elliott to sleep at 3:30 am Philly time (2 hours after we arrived) and he was awake exactly 4 hours later freezing cold with major boogers up his nose.
A good start to our trip, but that isn’t the best part. I decided that since we were so close, I wanted to go to Washington DC for the day. I wanted my baby boy to see our nation’s capital and I had grandiose dreams of walking the Mall with him in his stroller and having Ross take our picture in front of the World War II memorial. That and I wanted to eat at Cosi, a cute little bistro-ey chain place that I really, really like. Ross, being ever dutiful, obliged and after we got some of his work stuff out of the way, we headed to DC. Problem – it was a Friday afternoon, traffic is always horrendous back east, and we just kept hitting the wrong road. Our rental car has a navigation system and the woman navigating us had done a wonderful job, but we just couldn’t seem to get her directions right. I knew my hopes of “snapshots to remember” was lost in our “3 hour tour” and by the time we got to a Cosi in Arlington, we had driven the sketchy roads of the District of Columbia got lost on Constitution Avenue, didn’t get out of the car once, had Elliott screaming out of hunger and despair, and me feeling like a total moron.
It all worked out alright, I guess. Cosi was tasty and worth the drive, Elliott ordered off of the kids menu and ate most of a grilled cheese and flirted with every girl in the joint. My kid, I discovered today, is a flirt. He stares and smiles at every girl and woman he see’s regardless of age, race, nationality, dress. He knows exactly what do to and even the woman at the toll road booths smiled and talked to him from their booth to our car.
2 comments:
Your baby is cute. I miss him
I miss him, too. Are you coming for dinner?
Mom
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