It's Day One of the Rest of Our Year

There's a song I like by Matthew West called "Day One", and while it's totally unrelated to this blog post (well it could sort of be related, we ARE a starting over in a way) I decided to steal his title. This is about day one of the ret of our year.

It's day one of the rest of my life
It's day one of the best of my life
I'm marching on to the beat of a brand new drum
Yeah, here I come 
The future has begun
Day one ------------   Matthew West

August 3rd The Husband and I boarded a plane bound for Germany with The Daughter (3 1/2) and The Son 1 1/2). We have a couple of weeks of vacation travel planned and then 5 months in the southwest region of Germany. I have to admit I was slightly terrified of the 9 hour and 25 minut flight, not to mention the following days of time and culture adjustment. In fact, I've even had friends at church watch me try to keep The Son contained and still during church and laugh at the thought of him contained in a plane! His last flight was 8 months ago and he screamed inconsolably the entire short flight. Thankfully the ear tubes he got 2 months ago seem to have helped. 

Our first flight is less than an hour, I was assigned to The Son because he's a Mommy's boy. My tips from this flight:

1 - snacks are always better from alternative containers 

2 - Forget toys, empty water bottles are the best!

3 - You're never too young for educational reading. 

Layovers can be a bit stressful with young children. They NEED to expend energy between flights but you don't want to use up the patience of your fellow travelers before you ever board the plane. Since our terminal didn't have a play area we made our own. Here kids, take care of some luggage!

 

And while we were waiting at the gate the agent told us she had moved the other person assigned in our block of 5 seats (2 seats and 3 across the aisle) to another seat so we could have all 5 for kids to sleep! That. Was. Awesome. It made such a difference! 

The second flight was almost too easy. I won't say it was easy because it took me to put both kids asleep and I can only be in place at a time. But The Son was asleep before takeoff and slept the first 3 hours!!!! (I should say that 2 nights before the trip we started melatonin and moved bedtime up an hour and the next night we moved it 2 hours to 6pm and we departed at 3:30pm. I also gave both kids melatonin after we boarded. 

He slept off and on and mostly just wanted held the rest of the time. The Daughter was slightly more high maintenance but still not on bad. She made a friend with the gentleman behind her and frequently talked to him, played on the iPad, listened to way too loud music and enjoyed the airplane dinner. Much to my surprise she didn't even mind using the airplane bathroom! But settling down for her was more challenging. The Husband kept trying but wasn't having luck so we swapped kids. I sang her our bedtime songs and said a prayer before she asked for her "Tranquil Child" drops. 2 minutes later she was sound asleep too and got about 2-3 hours of sleep. 

The only one who didn't really get any sleep was The Husband (sorry Honey!) 

We collected all of our luggage and passed off 3 of our suitcases to a friend to keep during our vacation and then got our car. I need to take a picture of it because it's very small and you should have seen the face of the lease agent when he saw what all we had to fit in it! It's completely packed. We will need to scale down our stuff in order to just have room for souvenirs! Then off to Nuremberg for our first night. The Daughter, who has never ever gotten car sick began screaming that her stomach hurt. Now she can be quite the drama queen when she wants but apparently this is real...she kept throwing up in the car. Perhaps it's because it's a small car and she's used to a mini van, plus she was tired and probably slightly dehydrated from the flight. But driving to dinner that night it happened again - acute screaming followed by...the deed. Ick. I had taken 2 changes of clothes for the kids on the flight and they didn't need them and she had gone through 3 in one day now! By the time we explored the city a bit and had dinner we had tired kids. Or perhaps exhausted?

 Today I gave her Zofran before we got in the car and she did great, no clue if it's the medicine or getting adjusted. But there was no vomit, and we even got prepared and got bags for her now too! We had a few hours drive though and I needed to try to get her to not scream in the car today. We drove to Prague, Czech Republic today and are a sightseeing a few days here. The Hilton Prague is an absolutely beautiful hotel, one of the nicest in the Czech Republic we're told. 

Our biggest issue we've had (so far) has actually been that The Daughter has no low volume to her voice. Seriously, she is LOUD!!!! We have tried since she was a baby to quiet her and she's just loud! And she's almost always making noise. She's made up numerous songs and rides along on the stroller singing nonsense songs, but she's happy! Unfortunately, we are a bit of a conspicuous family...what, you hadn't noticed????? ;) Being the white Americans with 2 brown children, one of whom smiles cutely and waves to everyone and one of whom is very very loud makes us just slightly conspicuous. Oh well. I just keep smiling! 

And on that note, we are ALL still smiling! 

Dear Lord, thank You for our safe and uneventful travels so far. This is an amazing opportunity you've blessed  us with. Please help us to glorify your name during our time here and to show Christ through our actions and lives. And Lord, please remind me in the hard times to keep smiling! Amen.