April 12: We’re back home after spending a wonderful weekend in Wichita visiting with Bryan’s parents, Melanie and Ben, and seeing all Andrew and Sylvie’s Wichita great-grandparents. I love traveling and visiting people we care about. The hours we get to spend in their company are definitely worth the, er, discomforts of traveling with two small children. And on the flight home, those discomforts were particularly wet and smelly.
Our flights home took us through St. Louis on our way home to Madison. Sylvie isn’t the kind of kid who likes to sit still or read books or play with toys, so flights with her are substantially more challenging than they were with Andrew. She cried gustily for a good portion of our first flight. I try to find a zen place and keep her from walloping me in the face with her flailing head. When we’re in the airport, though, she’s generally great (if she can do whatever she wants). She’ll walk (I just wrote crawl, but she’s stopped crawling all together now!) from person to person and waves and blows kisses and makes ridiculous faces to make them laugh. So layovers with her are pretty good…if I can keep her from toddling in to the men’s restroom without igniting her fury.
Our flight from St. Louis to Madison started out good enough. There was a good-looking guy sitting behind us. And Sylvie loves cute boys. So she spent a good 30 minutes flirting with him by peering up over the top of the seat or by peeking around the side. He was kind enough to engage her. But on our descent into Madison, things really fell apart.
Sylvie had been having a big snack, including drinking lots of water. At one point, she gagged on a piece of a goldfish cracker, and for the first time in her life, she threw up. All over herself. I caught some of the sour-smelling mucusy water in my hand, and we sat there together for a stunned moment, watching the liquid slowly, goo-ily drip down onto my pants.
I glanced over at Bryan, my mind scrambling for an idea about how to clean up this unfolding disaster, and he looks around and hands me the cocktail napkin from under his drink.
A cocktail napkin.
I encouraged him to GET THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT, and when he seemed to be trying to get her attention by hand signals, I said, “This is one of those time when you use that button over your head.” Within a moment, she was there with a battalion of cocktail napkins, I was able to empty my hand of its gooey contents. Sylvie’s dress was soaked, but I didn’t have back-up clothes, so I put my hands under her dress to keep the cold fabric off her skin. It was about that time that she lost it.
I think it was mostly pain-inducing altitude changes that caused her distress. Well, I’m sure that wearing a vomit-soaked dress didn’t help. In any case, she was inconsolable for maybe 20 minutes…until we landed.
Andrew was such a sweet big-brother, offering her toys and trying to cheer her, but she was in an eyes-closed, no-cheering-accepted state of mind. Eventually, my boy fell asleep as a coping mechanism.
After we landed, Sylvie cheered up again. The two of us smelled rather sour, however, until we got home and tossed her straight into the tub.
We had a wonderful time. I’m happy to have the traveling part of our vacation behind us once again:) I’m looking forward to a run-of-the-mill, quiet week at home. Stay tuned for a re-cap of our fun times in Wichita!
