RTT: thank goodness I have photos

RTT!!!! How I missed you last week!  We were in the States for 10 days and I missed RTT.  I'm glad to have you back! Wait, I'm jet lagged. It is Tuesday, right?


*Why do we say a pair of pant or pair of underwear?   It's one item.  I can see calling socks a pair, because there are 2 of them, but why pants and underwear??  Because they have 2 leg holes?  A shirt has 2 arm holes and we don't call it a pair of shirts.  I'm sure it probably has something to do with way back when pants and underwear were actually two separate pieces for each leg that were tied together with laces, but I'm not sure.  I need to know! 

*While we were in the States we took Indy on a surprise trip to Disney (Han Solo stayed with my mom).  We told him we were going on a crafting trip and that the big project was to make a quilt.  He was not pleased but we thought it was hysterical.  I'll tell the whole story another day.

*10% of the Russian government's income come from the sale of vodka.

*Our lovely hostess, Stacy, was kind enough to send me a few bottles of her own wine to sample while I was in the States.  It was yummy!!!  I'll be doing a post on it soon. 

*James Bond was standing in the living room singing very badly a while ago.  Indy looked at me and said "Do you have a hook?"  Snort.

*All clams are born male and some decide to become female later in their lives.  Those are the smart clams.  :)

*I have loads of random photos for you today.  Ready?

*Are these not the largest mushrooms you've ever seen in a store???  They were 5-7" in length.

*Indy thought this little delivery truck was cute.  Not something he'd want to ride in, but cute.  Do you think there is much call for glasses delivery?

*Indy and I went to a German store the day before Easter and at the checkout, they gave everyone hard boiled eggs.  Isn't that odd?

*Look at what's written in the  yellow box at the top.  "New Easy-Grip Bottle"  Really?  Was the bottle that hard to grip in the first place?  Does the slight curve make a real difference?

*This is just down the autobahn from us.  It's hard to see (I had to take the photo with my phone while driving very slowly-dangerous, I know).  Those are advertisements on the church roof that are to be read from the planes landing at the Frankfurt Airport.  Who thought this up?

Okay, I'm done today.  My brain is still a bit fogged from the time change and I can't think of anything else.  Good thing I had loads of photos on my phone, eh?

I'm also linking up to TTUT.  Click the link at the top and below to join up and link your own randoms or TTUT.

Traveling with a baby: it's NOT about the journey

Hello my lovelies!!! Have you missed me? I've been away in the exotic US of A! And what happens while I'm gone? Blogger does some sort of update and now I'm totally lost.  Boo.  Enough about Blogger.  More about me.
James Bond will be leaving for the 'Stan soon for...a long time, and we (read: I) decided that since he hasn't seen his family since 2007, he needed to go see them before he deploys.  My family happens to live in the same area, so it worked out well (for the most part).
Whoever said it's about the journey and not the destination has never taken that journey with a 1 year old.  Ugh.  Han Solo does not like to fly.  You know those people on your plane with the screaming baby?  Yeah, that was us.  If you happened to be on a flight from Frankfurt to Houston on April 9 or Houston for Frankfurt on April 22, let me just apologize.  We tried.  Really hard.  He was just not having it.  Let me tell you that as a general rule,  Han Solo sleeps about 17 hours out of every single day.  Every. Single. Day.  On a 14 hour plane ride?  Not so much.  Dear sweet baby Zeus it was awful.  Okay, maybe not that bad, but still.  On the first flight (14 hours) he slept for approximately 45 minutes.  Yes, that is all.  He was not happy about it either and let us all know.  In retrospect he only cried and fussed for a combined total of about 3 hours (not all at once), but when you're the parent of that screaming child it seems like much, much longer.  I was stressed out that he was so upset and worried that the other passengers would hate us, which seems silly since we'll never see them again, but still, I worried.  After that first flight, we had to go through immigration and customs, which took forever and barely made our second flight.  In fact they were paging us to the gate as we were running full tilt through the terminal praying they wouldn't shut the gates before we got there.  We made it just in time and on that flight, all one and a half hours, Han Solo slept the entire freaking way. 
When we got to our destination it was 9pm and approximately 7 million degrees (it was 44 when we left Frankfurt) and Han Solo went right to bed and slept most of the night.  Thank goodness.  The time change was difficult on him, but just a day or two before it was time to come back home, he settled in and got used to it.  Nice.
Our return home was...adventurous.  There was bad weather in Houston and our plane in was grounded.  We were due to leave at 2:30pm, but didn't actually leave until 6:15pm, with us arriving at 7:45pm.  Han Solo was not happy.  When we got to Houston, our plane to Frankfurt (originally scheduled for 6:30pm) was still on the Tarmac!  Huzzah!  Unfortunately for us, it left 10 minutes after we touched down. :(  United/Continental (what are they called now???) was wonderful though and put us up at the Hyatt, gave us $110 in food vouchers and rescheduled us for the same flight the next day.  We put a ridiculously tired Han Solo in the hotel crib and prayed he would sleep.  I went to the hotel restaurant to get some dinner ($40 in vouchers for 2 burger and fries, a chicken sandwich and fries and 3 drinks) since we hadn't eaten in about 8 hours.  When I got back Han Solo was asleep and we were afraid to make any noise lest we wake the beast.  We sat on the floor in complete silence and ate.  Indy leaned over at one point and whispered "Best floor burgers ever."  Tee hee.
The hotel was kind enough to let us have a late check out so we didn't have to hang out at the airport all day with Han Solo being a crab, so we slept late and napped before heading back to the airport to catch our flight.  One of the check in people gave us grief about one of our bags being 9 lbs over weight, which I don't understand since we were allowed 8 bags but had only 4.  What's 9 lbs when we're saving 200, plus the fact that none of our other bags were even at the limit???  After we got that sorted (another check in worker told her to let it go) it was off to security.  Ugh.  Since we were supposed to do a connection, we shouldn't have had to do security again, but as we missed the flight we had to do it all over.  Dear heavens is that exhausting.  Ever go through security with a baby and a child?  Yuck.  It takes forever!  You practically have to disrobe yourself and your children, remove every piece of metal that might have come in contact with you at any point in your life, walk across a gross floor without your shoes, be subject to a bag search and pat down and then you have to put everything back on and repack your bags, while trying to keep your children from running away. 
Our flight was pretty much full so it turned out that we were not sitting together.  What?  Yep, true.  We had 2 seats in row 22 and 2 seats in row 24, on opposite sides of the aisles.  Nice.  James Bond decided to sit with Han Solo and let me sit with Indy.  Han Solo did much better on this flight.  He slept about 4-5 hours!  At one point though, he was fussing and I leaned over to Indy and said "Man, I wish they'd get that baby to be quiet," and he said, "Yeah, I know!  Sheesh!  Get control of your kid people."  I love that boy.
I love to travel and see new places, but the getting there is not my favorite part and getting there with a baby is so much less than fun.   Trust me, when traveling with a baby, it is NOT about the journey.



 

Happy Birthday Han Solo!!!!

Today is the big day:  Han Solo turns 1!  Can you believe it's already been a year?  It seems like just yesterday he was a teeny little baby just coming into the world. 
Today I took the last of the "incredibly shrinking bear" photos.  This was the hardest one because he's so busy it was hard to get him to sit still for the photo.  I took 47 photos and got 4 where he was sitting still.  Whew!

 
If you missed the other monthly photos you can see them here.  It's amazing the difference from month to month.

Happy birthday my sweet baby.

RTT: Han Solo and the Incredibly Shrinking Bear

Well, hello and happy RTT to all! This week's RTT is going to be a bit different. I know you all love my crazy random facts and all, but today is special. My RTT a year ago this week was a Special Delivery Edition, because I'd had little Han Solo the day before.  That's right, my little man will be 1 tomorrow!  I can't believe it.  BTW, if you're interested in learning how different it is to give birth in a German hospital and how freaking awesome I truly am, you should read the RTT linked above.  But not yet.
Anyhoo, Indy wanted a special gift to give Han Solo when he was born, so we found a little teddy bear that had "Little Brother" on it and every month on the 4th (he was born April 4th) we've taken a photo of him with it to show how much he's grown.  Tomorrow we take his 1 year photo (HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?).  Today I'm going to show you the past 11 months.  Oh, and so you know, the bear is approximately 9" high.

 Birthday-April 4, 2011-5 lbs 6 oz

 1 month-May 4, 2011

 2 months-June 4, 2011

 3 months-July 4, 2011 (this is my favorite photo)

 4 months-August 4, 2011

 5 months-Sept 4, 2011

 6 months-Oct 4, 2011

 7 months-Nov 4, 2011

8 months-Dec 4, 2011

 9 months-Jan 4, 2012

10 months-Feb 4, 2012

11 months-Mar 4, 2012

Tomorrow we will take his last teddy bear photo.  :(

I hope you enjoyed my nostalgic look back at the last amazing 11 months.  I should have his 1 year photo up tomorrow or the next day, so drop back by to see it.

I'm also liking up with TTUT.  Click the buttons and link yourself to RTT and TTUT.




Now I'm off to weep because the year has gone by too quickly.