Cold Spaghetti

New Orleans’ favorite coffee stand is reopening. It’s time to go home.

I got wind of the call for abstracts for the conference for the Society for Applied Anthropology. The conference is the last weekend in March in Vancouver, a top on our must-see travel list (especially because of the possibility of meeting up with friends Katherine and Randy!) The SfAA is a conference I’d really like to attend. So, I quickly signed up and submitted my abstract and hope to be selected to present a poster — seeing as I’ll be hugely pregnant by then, I decided to keep it simple with a poster. Fingers crossed for good news about this one.

My Mom and Dad took the Monkey to the Mobile Exploreum today where Will was treated to his first movie. The report: he loved it, whispered “buggie” repeatedly, and fell asleep for the last twenty minutes of the show.

The really exciting part is that Paul and I had a free afternoon! A beautiful, perfect weather, Saturday afternoon… all alone. The possibilities of romance endless, we did what any parenting couple would do: slept.

I read more of “Wicked” (which is turning out to be great) and promptly fell asleep. According to Paul, it was one of those super-deep sleeps that involves heavy snoring… I’m told that I snore pretty decently when pregnant. Poor Paul, who is feeling under the weather anyway, couldn’t sleep with my soundings. (The table is so often turned in this regard that I almost have a hard time feeling badly for him.) Later, I found him asleep a few rooms over, snoring, stretched uncomfortably on the sofa with a puzzle book tucked under an arm.

Travel worn and weary, we rolled in at 9pm last night. We were scheduled to get before 6, but decided to take a re-directed flight with the perk of …. a pair of free round-trip tickets to anywhere in the Continental US and Canada, good for one year! (Plus a $20 voucher for dinner.) We’re not sure how we’ll use the tickets yet but feel a bit excited about the possibilities.

The downside was that we were on three flights yesterday with two layovers. Will is a champion flier, but it was a long day for us all. He did great. Especially with the help of drugs, which I whole-heartedly encourage for little ones. (There is a big difference between the experience of air pressure change in awake kids versus asleep kids.) Now that he is 22 months old, this was probably the last time we’ll fly with Will as a lap child. We have no plans to fly until after Will’s 2nd birthday (November 21st), after which we are required to buy a ticket for him and bring some type of child seat. What a pain in the butt.

We figure that Will has now had somewhere in the range of 35 takeoffs. I believe that makes me somewhat of a frequent-parent traveller and have come to some thoughts about what airlines should be doing to make flying a bit more family-friendly.

1. I’ve found that many airports are installing play tables for children — an awesome plus. Keep doing this!
2. Offer milk on flights! Any kind of milk, just have milk. You have ice, why not chill some milk? Finding milk is actually difficult in the airport and running around trying to find some between tight flights is a serious pain. There is only so much a parent can bring from home and not enough to cover a full day of flying.
3. Let families with lap children book the bulkhead seats!! They are reserved for those who need wheelchair assistance. However, at check-in, should there be no wheelchair users, families should be offered these seats — and at booking, there should be a way to earmark them for families in the case of non-use. What we see happen over and over again is that last minute passengers get them or they are left only partially used. No one likes having the backs of their chairs kicked and kids really like to kick. We’ve taught Will that “gentleman sit” in chairs but it is inevitable with moving in the tight space that the chair in front is going to be bounced a few times. Put families in bulkhead.

Happily eating is cupcake (a treat from Christie and David). 

Checking out the Otters at the North Carolina Manteo Aquarium. While there, we attended the kids’ talk on reptiles and the hands-on session with sting rays. Will was especially fond of the otters. So much that Nana bought him an otter t-shirt in the gift store! 

Otter fascination. 

Telling Nana all about the beach. He chattered a lot to us this week. Conversations of particular importance usually involved words like: airplane, helicopter, beach, ocean, big agua, bird, buggie, otter, shark, fishie, shoes, and ice cream. 

At the docks