the traveling circus returns

Having mistaken "harder" for "easier," what we thought was, now that we have two kids, traveling will surely be easier. And so we went out of town again last weekend, this time to Long Island for some family birthday parties. Dylan and Ollie got to hang out with their second cousins, who have cakes and Mercedes. We'll have to work on yielding to pedestrians.


Actually, Dylan's pretty easy to travel with. She thinks planes are the most exciting thing ever, and she's good for about four hours in the car. Plus, with the magical ipod we always have games, movies, and music, except for those unfortunate times when portable electronic devices are not approved for use.

Ollie still doesn't care where he sleeps, so he travels okay too. And he thinks he's a parrot and goes to sleep when I put a blanket over his head.

Check out our young recruit in action.

We devised a system of getting on the plane where Aaron went ahead with Dylan while I waited until the last minute to get on with Ollie. We failed to realize it was one of those walk down the steps, over to the plane, and up the steps again situations, so I had an unfortunate jacket-less wait at the end of the line in the 15 degree weather. Little did I know the plane had just come out of the hanger and wasn't that much warmer. Then I got on the plane, only to have Aaron and Dylan working their way towards me, muttering something about spilled orange juice. I glared at Aaron because this was eerily reminiscent of a similar unpleasant incident where my seat got doused with water while I waited to board with Dylan. Then I realized, wait, I have our orange juice. It was the adult couple sitting next to us that had doused my seat with juice while I waited to board with Ollie. I switched to glaring at them, only in my head.

The flight back was cool because 1) Dylan got to see the top of the Chrysler Building (oh yes, it continues) and 2) it was so clear it was like looking at a map the whole time. I could follow along by the shapes of the finger lakes, and we got to see Ithaca for a while. Here is Cayuga Lake.


***

Speaking of birthday parties, as I assure you we were earlier in the post, it's Aaron's birthday season again!


We've kicked off the proceedings with a full slate of activities, but festivities will surely continue all month and into next.