The Adventure Begins

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Mom took the day off on Tuesday to finish preparing for our trip to Tennessee. Mom did the final packing, tidied up around the house and left out some things for the cat. Mom uses the Boppy pillow to encourage Caleb to get some tummy time when she works in the bedroom. If you look at this picture closely, you'll see that Mom captured a trail of drool from Caleb's lower lip to the pillow.

Mom packed the car by herself, then packed up Caleb and headed toward my office in the afternoon to pick me up and head to the airport. Other than the drive to Naples for my conference in June, we have not done any extended travelling with Caleb, so we were feeling apprehensive about our flight to Nashville. Mom picked me up about three hours before our flight because we wanted to have a full two hours to get checked in and through security.

Our journey did not get off to a good start. There is normally heavy traffic heading out of downtown Miami in the evening, but I didn't expect extremely heavy traffic as early as we were leaving, so we were shocked to be sitting on the interestate nearly at a dead standstill. What should have been a 40-50 minute drive to the Fort Lauderdale airport ended up being well over an hour. To make matters worse, Caleb decided he was going to cry, so we were sitting in traffic with a screaming baby. I tried giving him a pacifier, but he kept spitting it out. After a while, he finally cried himself to sleep and just about made it all the way to the airport.

Things picked up once we got to the airport. I can tell you that an 8:00 P.M. flight from Fort Lauderdale to Tampa on a Tuesday night is a good time to travel. We were able to walk straight to the ticket counter to check our bags and get a boarding pass for Caleb. There was also no line to get through security, so the first time we did security with Caleb was pretty stress free. Our luck had not completely improved as our plane out of Fort Lauderdale was extremely delayed. Fortunately, Southwest held our plane out of Tampa and we ended up getting to Nashville about an hour late.

Caleb is starting to hold on to objects. We captured this picture of him playing with his burp cloth before he started to drift off to sleep.

Caleb did better with the flights than I expected. Mom had changed Caleb into his pajamas while we waited in the terminal and was he ready to sleep by the time we boarded the plane. He ended up in my lap for our initial takeoff. We used one of his blankets to shield his eyes from the lights in the cabin. I think Caleb would have slept through whole flight, but I tried to uncross my legs when my foot fell asleep and that was enough to rouse him. He fussed a little bit and Mom held him during the landing.

The flight from Tampa to Nashville, so Southwest held the plane for us. Becuase they were waiting on us, we had to make a made dash through the Tampa terminal. Making a made dash through a terminal is not easy with a fourteen pound baby in a baby carrier bouncing of your leg. Since it was the last flight on an off night, the plane was not crowded at all. We made our way to the back of the plane and settled in to our seats. We were able to get a row to ourselves and while we were in the air, Caleb laid across the middle seat between us. Caleb started getting cranky on this flight, but I think it was due more to tiredness than the fact we were on a plane. Caleb fell asleep toward the end of the flight and slept through the landing.

I carried Caleb through the terminal and we found Granddaddy and Whatshername waiting for us as close as they could get without security tackling and arresting them. Since Caleb was asleep, we gathered our bags and headed for the car. Other than a stop to grab some dinner, we headed straight to Columbia. Due to the lateness of the hour, we weren't up for long before we headed to bed for the last good night's rest we would get from that point until now.

P.S. Our travel day happened to coincied with Caleb's 3-month birthday. As Granddaddy put it, Caleb was 1/4 that day.