Leaving for Vacation was No Picnic

I'm up early with Eli this morning (he's gotten up early both days now since his body is on Central time, but we're on the West Coast two hours earlier...) and the rest of the house is completely silent. I figured it was a good time to write about the craziness of Saturday morning when we tried to get out of town.

Backing up - on Friday night, I had about 100 things I was trying to get done before we left the next morning. I was running errands as late as 11:30 p.m. and then came home to start packing my suitcase. I ended up getting three hours of sleep that night and STILL didn't finish everything on my list.

On Saturday morning, we woke up at 5 a.m. to be ready for our cab that was picking us up at 6 a.m. I sat in the backseat with Eli, and the first thing I noticed (as the Nigerian cab driver zoomed off with us inside) was that his car's speedometer was not working. Fantastic. The second thing I noticed was that he had a Bible sitting on top of the dashboard - it was the African American Jubilee Edition. I couldn't decide if it was on the dashboard for protection from his crazy driving?? The cabbie blasted a religious radio station the entire way.

The cab flew down Lake Shore Drive (at who knows how fast of speed), on our way to Midway Airport. Ben and I had debated driving our car to the long-term parking lot and taking the shuttle over, but I was nervous about having Eli in one of those shuttle buses without a car seat (and those shuttle bus drivers are never the safest either). I sat there closing my eyes thinking, this is MUCH worse than 5 minutes on the shuttle bus...

We made it to the airport in just under an hour. Ben pulled out his credit card and the cabbie acted like his credit card machine was broken! That would have been nice to know as we didn't have enough cash to pay him. So Ben ran into the airport looking for an ATM and came back a few minutes later with some more money.

Fast forward to our 4 hours, 20 minutes on the airplane to Portland. Eli was tired, but was too stubborn to give in and fall asleep. Instead, he fussed for about 3 hours of the flight (I think the entire plane was listening to his unhappiness - there weren't any other small children on the flight). Our tricks kept him happy for maybe an hour total. My favorite thing was when the guy in front of Eli decided to recline his seat, leaving zero leg room for my child (we brought Eli's car seat onthe plane, so his legs were sticking out rather than straight down) and Eli, in his tired, frustrated state of being, kept pushing on the back of this guy's seat (despite my efforts to get him to stop - after 10 min. of this, the guy brought his seat back up). Eli finally slept for the last 30 minutes of the flight.

In the meantime, my lack of sleep all last week had caught up to me, and I was getting a bad cold. On the flight's descent, I had the most HORRIBLE sinus pressure and pain - it felt like someone was shooting darts through my face, behind my eyes, nose, and jaw. I was in tears the entire way down and made a beeline to buy some tylenol once we were off the plane. Thankfully, Ben's cousin is a doctor and I am now taking an antibiotic to get rid of my sinus infection.

Now that we're here, things are going well. There are 31 of us staying at Ben's brother's house for the weekend and then we'll go to the big reunion with 110 Seversons (we rent space at a camp) for the rest of the week. It should be fun! I'm not looking forward to our flight home though... (or the cab ride back :)

(and I'll post pictures next time - sorry for the text-heavy post...)