headin' back to texas...

we made it back to texas! can you believe it? well, only for a week or so. but we'll take what we can get. this past saturday cheryl, annabel and i boarded a jet plane and headed off to the lone star state for christmas. this trip was special for a few reasons. one, it was to be the first plane ride for miss annabel. not knowing how she would react to that, we were pretty excited and nervous. and second, if texas ever leaves the union, we're hoping this will help her chances when she wants to apply for texas citizenship. not sure but it can't hurt. :)

cheryl worked for about two straight days getting ready for the trip. washing clothes, gathering bottles, shopping for diapers and packing suitcases. it was a lot of work! she told me friday night as we were watching the snow come down and wondering if our flight would still happen, that this trip had better happen if for no other reason then that she spent so much time preparing for it. it was funny. so we went to bed friday night with our bags packed, our christmas presents wrapped, our boarding passes printed and hoping for decent enough weather that the big day would still happen. and then we woke up saturday morning to nothing but white everywhere our eyes could see. whoa. actually it wasn't that bad. columbus got about 2-3 inches of snow but the temps were hovering around the freezing mark so the roads were clearing up pretty quickly and new snow was slowing down quite a bit. so we loaded up the car and headed to the airport. when we got to the counter to check our bags the attendant asked where we were going. we told him houston so he let us continue. the woman next to us showed up and said that she was going to new york. his response was, "then your flight has been canceled." ugh. then the next guy said that he was going to philadelphia and they told him that he had already been rebooked on a new flight the next day. apparently the 22.5 inches of snow that philadelphia got was an all-time record and nobody was getting in or out for a while. so we were pretty happy that we were coming to houston. worked out well for us. after that we made our way through security (much more complicated with a baby, a stroller and bottles of food for annabel) and on to our gate. annabel had been napping pretty well and she was just relaxing in her stroller. and once on the plane nothing much changed. we had heard that giving a baby a bottle to suck on during take off and landing would help their ears to pop. so we did and it worked. at least annabel showed no signs that she was anything but thrilled to be eating. and then she settled in for a nice two hour nap. when we were de-boarding, the ladies in the row in front of us noticed annabel and commented that they had no idea we even had a baby on board. if they did they probably would have been turned around talking to her the whole time. so we were fine with nobody knowing. :)

all in all annabel travels well. this is a good thing because being in ohio, we'll probably have more than a few trips over the years to texas, new jersey and all sorts of other places. i will say however that her bag was only three pounds lighter than mine (and i had the christmas gifts)...amazing. :)