Back in January, we FINALLY bought tickets to go see my mission--something we've been talking about doing since before we got married. The plan was to fly to Georgia to visit Lara and Greg, then drive to Tennessee to see Ben and Jenny, drive to Alabama to see my two areas there, drive to Panama City Beach, FL to spend some time on the beach and see my mission peeps, and then drive back to Georgia and fly home. Total time we would be gone: 2 weeks.
I spent a month getting ready. I wanted to figure out ways to keep the kiddos entertained through the flights and all that driving. I was particularly worried about Rachel, who can barely handle the drive to Idaho. How was I going to keep this "lap infant" happy on the plane when she doesn't like being held for very long? So, I asked Google that question and came up with a few things. One person mentioned this Baby B'air flight vest. (You should google them and check out their product video. It is unintentionally hilarious!). Basically, it is a harness that your child wears and that you clip your seat belt through so that you can be hands free. Sounded like it would work. Unfortunately, it was about $30 on Amazon, and we weren't completely convinced. After mulling it over for a few weeks, I decided that it wouldn't be that hard to make one. Rachel was excited to wear it when I was trying it on her.
I made two window I spy bags; a bag for Michael for his coloring books, which included a spot for all his crayons; a bag for Rachel to hold magnets, a book, her Color Wonder drawing pad, and a spot for her Color Wonder Markers; a game for Rachel (an empty spice container and pipe cleaners--you give her the container and the pile of pipe cleaners, and one by one, she puts them into the holes in the spice jar. Thanks, Zak, for the great idea).
I also made magnets, a coloring book about all the states we were going to visit, Rachel's Easter dress, and a skirt for me. Oh! And in the middle of that, my sister called and asked if I could make a costume for my niece for her school play:
It was too big. Oh well. She loved it.
And since Lara was going to have twins, I HAD to make something for them, so I finally sewed up the alligator taggie blanket I cut out last summer for our new nephew and then made a coordinating kitty cat for our new niece. I hope they like them:
Towards the beginning of March, we bought a car. We'd been looking for a month or more and decided to buy one through an online broker. He looked at cars for us and then bid on them at an auction. We told him the kind of car we wanted, color preferences, price range, and year. He sent us pictures of ones that fit the bill. He bid on it, we won, and then we started all the paper work to get it to us. As part of the deal, our broker was going to handle getting it shipped to us in Utah. We bought the car on March 12. And two to three weeks after that, we still didn't have our car. No one wanted to ship it for the price he said he could ship it. We got angry and frustrated. We looked into finding our own carrier. Meanwhile, our trip was coming up, and that added to the stress. If we didn't have our car before we left, how would we get it? Long story shorter, we had our broker ship it to Georgia so we could just drive it home. I made arrangements at the DMV to extend our temporary Georgia permit (since it was going to expire on April 11). I added states to Michael's coloring book, bought a kids atlas, and then bit the bullet and bought DVD players for the car. We decided that no matter how bad it got, we were going to laugh all the way home! We would leave from Panama City Beach and head home through Texas so we could stop by to see Adam and Sarah (and hopefully T.J. and Lacey) and see tons of new states in the process. The day before we left, I made another bag for our pack and play to help protect it on the flight (before the car thing, we were just going to borrow Lara's). I also did laundry and packed. Miraculously, for the first time ever, I didn't stay up really late getting things ready.
The day finally arrived, and on April 8, we left our house at 6 a.m. to catch our 7:50 a.m. flight to Atlanta.
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