En Route

All the travel went shockingly smoothly. The leg with the most hitches was actually the shortest easiest one, the direct 2-hour flight from Vancouver to San Francisco. It started with a very long line to check in, which it turns out we didn't need to wait in because my dad has magic airline-status granting powers. Once we reached the check-in desk we learned that we would not all be sitting together, which would be good for neither us nor any nearby citizens. They don't have a conveyor belt for checked luggage (although I packed SO LIGHTLY there was no way around having to check something, what with the children and all their accoutrements) so then we had to keep dragging all our stuff to the next station, where they put the bags through a huge screener before they took them. We were already a little worried with how long things had taken when we realized that customs was actually in Vancouver, before the gates. It said Welcome to the United States right there, in Canada. Confusing, eh?

We rushed Dylan past a nice looking playground to get to the gate and Aaron ran off to get us lunch. He kindly, if impractically, got me a bowl of soup he knew I would love, so I slurped down as much as possible before we got on, while dousing my clothing only minimally. Our fellow passengers looked on in horror as they realized we were sitting near, but not next to each other, and leapt to their feet to get away from us, even into a middle seat. We moved into the empty seats in their wake. I heard the three people in the other row comparing ages of their children (21 and 26, 19 and 22, 17 and 19) before breathing a synchronized sigh of relief. I offered them Ollie at that point.

Ollie, as I've mentioned, poops like every fourth or fifth day. Yet he chose those two hours in the air to do what needed to be done. I told Aaron I hadn't had a mess like that on my hands in at least a month. That was, apparently, a challenge because Aaron then calculated the probability that such a thing would happen in a given two hour period over the course of a month, excluding sleep time. I think it was like 4.7%.

Lap baby. Ollie and spent about 7 hours like this on Monday.

And done.