[Female and male cardinal.]

Both Joshua and I left Ronin for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago (well, awake that is); my parents watched her for something like seven hours and how does it go? Apparently she never even asked where we were. She’s going to be a very grateful teenager, I can tell already.

We made the journey to Arizona, which included an hour commute via bus and train and that was just to get to the airport. We had one long flight, a connection in Phoenix and another super short flight. So short that when the pilot got on to welcome us aboard, he said we were already making our descent into Tucson and don’t even think about complimentary beverages. Ronin was amazingly calm and happy the entire flight and airport change. Well, until the last twenty minutes.

My parents live out in the desert south of Tucson. They have two crazy dogs, which fascinate Ronin, but who are sadly not interested in toddlers. Ronin found other diversions, such as rearranging the extensive (and likely ordered in some complicated way) CD collection, opening and dumping out spices, banging on the piano, and digging through small drawers.

Unfortunately, she managed to get sick toward the end of the trip; she had a fever and then developed a cough. A nasty one that triggered her gag reflex and made her barf. We were sort of worried about the plane ride home; my mom flew recently and a family with a sick baby got kicked off her plane in Texas. We dosed her with acetaminophen one hour before boarding.

Twenty minutes before boarding, she ate a bunch of power bar and grapes, which she then barfed up all over herself and Joshua’s shirt. Joshua emerged from the bathrooms with a wet spot the size of a dinner plate on his shirt and I took Ronin to try to clean her up. I ended up stripping her pants off to wash them and spot-cleaning her jacket and shirt. I changed her diaper so at least that was clean and brought her pantsless back to the terminal. She was kind of freaking out too—rolling around on the ground, not letting us pick her up, acting all hyper like she was overtired. Everyone bestowed upon the pantsless toddler who smelled of puke and was acting crazy looks of smiling happiness and goodwill. The flight did not go well.

We tried to keep her in our seat row while people boarded. Soon a 20-something girl stopped at our row, checking and double checking the overhead numbers. We were all “Congratulations! YOU WIN!!!” As she settled up against the window, she told us that she had just spent the past two weeks with her sister and her three small children. We hoped that they were more poorly behaved and vomitous than ours. She spent the next twenty minutes erecting an invisible wall between her seat and ours, stuffed headphones in her ears, and immersed herself in a really odd book where she stayed for the entirety of the flight.

We’re all recovering now from The Cold (except me, whose cold has morphed into a sinus infection. Bonus!). There is a lot of coughing and snot going around still. The other day she woke up crying “Dada, get the boogers OUT!”

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 11:25 am and is filed under doings, ronin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.