Our Trip: Part 1

Well, I have a lot to write about, and not a lot of time.  With Valentines Day and Carnaval this week, I've been keeping busy with things that I will also eventually want to write about.  It didn't help that I have been having computer issues lately, and wasn't able to download the pictures from my new camera to my computer in order to have them available to share them with you on my blog.  Mauri's Valentine's day gift, though, has solved that problem, and I am now typing from my beautiful, shiny new computer!!
In the interest of not getting any further behind, I will start to tell you a little bit about the beginning of our trip to visit Eric's American grandparents.  
In order to arrive on time at the airport for our first flight from Valencia to Madrid, we had to wake Eric up at around 3:30AM.  We figured, since he's used to sleeping in quite late, that he would sleep through the ride to the airport, and through the first flight which was scheduled for 6:10 AM.  We, of course, were wrong!

Not only did Eric not sleep in the car, but he stayed awake throughout the entire first flight.  It wasn't just that he was awake, but her was awake and very sleepy, which, translated correctly, means he was screaming throughout the entire flight.  We tried distracting him with food, water, toys, opening and closing of the window screen, breastfeeding...  Nothing seemed to work to keep him quiet!!  Luckily the flight only lasted around 45 minutes, and it was eventually over.

At the airport, and on the plane when he finally slept for a little while

To think that I had been so worried about getting Eric's milk onboard, which didn't present any problems whatsoever; I hadn't let myself get so nervous about what the trip would be like yet, but by that point that I realized what, exactly, we had really gotten ourselves into.
We arrived at the gate not knowing where we were going.  We decided to just walk away from the gate, and Eric was very happily playing on all of the conveyor belts.  He would scream when we left one, only to smile and laugh when he realized that we were about to get on another.  All of the action wore him out, and our very sleepy little boy ended up finally falling asleep in his stroller.  So we wheeled him around the terminal until we eventually found an elevator that brought us to an underground train that brought us to our next terminal.  After a very expensive breakfast of the only thing available to eat at that hour, doughnuts and coffee, we headed to the end of the terminal, and took a seat.  There was still too much time left before our flight for it to have come up on the monitors with our scheduled gate number.

As soon as we got comfortable, we were told that the area that we were sitting in was closing, and that we would have to leave.  A bit confused, we tried to figure out where, exactly, we were supposed to go.  They ended up only fencing off the last four gates of the terminal, and Mauri and I started to speculate as to which important person would cause such a heightened protocol, getting such preferential treatment as having a whole section of the terminal to themselves.  It turned out that we were the important people which were causing such a fuss.  An announcement was made that because our flight was heading to the United States, due to special security regulation for travel there, we were meant to check into our gate, and stay there, for one and a half hours before the flight.

I was a bit annoyed, and actually a bit nervous, about the whole situation.  Eric was still asleep, and I wanted to do what most places advised for traveling with toddlers: let them run around before the flight so that they are tired and sleep on the flight itself.  Seeing what cramped quarters we were going to be forced into, though, meant that there would be little room to let him run.  How long to let him sleep was another dilemma.  When he is very sleepy, he can be so sleepy that he can't actually get to sleep.  So, we wanted to let him sleep for at least part of the wait.  On the other hand, if he were to sleep up until boarding the plane, he wouldn't have a chance to run around, and would be difficult to deal with on the plane.
As the boarding time neared, more people started to come closer, and Eric eventually woke up to the sound of all of the other passengers around us.  He started to run around, and, to our surprise, wanted to run around and greet everybody around us.  Whenever we want him to "talk" to somebody, he is either too shy or too stubborn to want to meet that person.  Here, though, he wanted to meet everybody, including those who had absolutely no interest in meeting him!

Despite all of the "important" security measures, they didn't start to let us enter the fenced area around our gate until about an hour before the flight.  As usual, there were a few idiots who were pushing to get near to where the plane would board so that they could be the first to board the plane.  They seemed to pay no attention to the announcements about letting those with disabilities or small children go first.  I had gone to change Eric's diaper, and when I got back to where Mauri had been sitting, he was nowhere to be found.  I then realized, though, that they were calling for people with small children to come forward.  We had a bunch of the pushy losers in front of us, but the flight attendants pushed them away to let us pass.  I had been meaning to let Eric run around those last minutes, but there was no time left.  We were stuck in line.
I'm not sure it's such a good idea to line up the people with small children to let them board first.  On all of our flights, this has meant that we are stuck waiting for a very long time at the front of the line while they wait until they can open up the doors for boarding.  Waiting in line to board was insufferable because Eric wanted to get down on the floor to run around.

To make a very long story short, we finally got to board the plane.  We were lucky enough to find out that the plane was only partially full, so instead of being crammed into two seats by the window, a flight attendant looked for an open center section for us, and we had four seats to ourselves.  After that, though, things only got worse.  Eric screamed whenever we put the seemingly useless special seatbelt on him.  I tried to calm him, hide the fact that we were buckling it, and help compensate for the pressure changes by breastfeeding, hoping that it would make him fall asleep, but, unfortunately, we had no such luck.  The only thing it really accomplished was keeping his mouth shut for short periods of time.  The rest of the time he was screaming because he wanted to run around.

We imagined letting him run up and down the aisles as soon as the seatbelt signs were off, but when we tried that, he thought it was funny to touch all of the people on his way down the aisle, and, a couple of dirty looks later, we decided to try to keep him in our little section.

After one of the worst airplane meals I have ever eaten or tried to eat, they started to show our only scheduled movie.  I tried breastfeeding again, this time with much more luck.  Eric finally fell asleep until the end of the movie.  So, we were able to relax for around an hour and a half of the 9 hour trip.  The end of the movie, though, brought noise and lights which ended up waking up our sleepy, grouchy little boy.
For the remainder of our flight, I found myself periodically checking my watch and trying to calculate how much more of this we were going to have to endure.  I kept Eric occupied for awhile with his stacking cups, but he also had fun throwing the cups under the seat behind us, and I finally put those away after the person behind me handed me several of them a little while later.

Needless to say, we eventually got to Chicago, and we uneventfully zipped through customs and immigration.  On the other side of the door, grandma Sandra was waiting for us, and we told her all about our pleasant trip.

We had ordered a carseat for Eric from Walmart.com, and it was waiting for us in the car.  After figuring it out, we were finally headed towards Grand Rapids, MI.  We made a stop on the way for a cell phone to use during our trip, and after another short stop for a bite to eat, we continued on our way.  It was much later than I had imagined when we finally arrived home.  Eric had slept for most of the car ride, so when we arrived, he was more than happy to play with his new little playmate, a little pug named Bebe.

Mauri and I were exhausted, though, and we convinced Eric to get to sleep, despite the change from our normally very habitual bedtime rituals.  The three of us, used to sleeping in a queen sized bed and attached crib, squeezed ourselves into a full bed.  Eric fell asleep OK snuggled up between us, but, affected by the time difference, he woke up several times during the night.  By around 5AM, there was no chance of getting him back to sleep.

Luckily grandma Sandra usually wakes up very early anyway, and when Eric insisted on going into the hall to see the guau guau, she was already up.  After playing for awhile with Bebe, Eric accompanied us on a trip to the Bagel Beanery for breakfast, followed by a trip to Woodland Mall to play on the giant breakfast foods meant for kids to play on.  Eric really liked the chance to have something like that to play on.  (Too bad the malls in Spain aren't quite so kid friendly.)

We spent the next few days running from mall to mall, store to store, restaurant to restaurant.  We also went to visit Aunt Carol and Uncle Dan.  We would later return to her house that weekend to see the rest of the family: my cousins, Uncle Tim and honorary Grandpa Don. The day we went, a large amount of snow fell, and we were finally able to see how Eric would react to it.

Eric tried on his new winter jacket from Old Navy, where we had bought him a lot of cute new clothes, but he could barely move in it.  When we got him out into the snow, he just stood there frozen like a little statue.  We went shopping some more that morning, but it was snowing so hard that the car was completely covered with snow when we got outside.  As you can see, Mauri had to clean off the car so that we could continue on our way.

Seeing as how this post is already rather long, I will tell you more about our many adventures in the next post...