The best-laid plans of mice and men…

I’m well overdue for an entry!  B and I just returned from a few days in Salem and Boston, Massachusetts and a one-week cruise to Maine, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and frankly I’m exhausted!

On our return flight, B was a handful - no barf-bag puppet, lollipop, snacks, toys, Dora episode, or craft was sufficient to keep him cheery on this flight.  Though I try to keep his routine as normal as possible when we travel, a week and a half without Daddy, the excitement of new places and activities, punctuated by a flight delay was taking its toll.

As B gets older, it becomes more and more difficult to get him to keep his seat belt fastened, and this became my biggest challenge on this flight.  Not surprisingly, he’d rather be anywhere else than strapped to his seat for a whole flight.  Usually I wrap a flannel receiving blanket around the buckle – it is comfy and keeps the bucket out of sight and out of mind – but on this flight, he wasn’t having any part of that.

Our short hour and a half flight felt like a decade, and I swore to myself for our next flight, one of us would be flying duct-taped to a wing.  But only a few days later, I find myself imagining our next trip and looking forward to another adventure.

No amount of creative and strategic carry-on packing was sufficient for this flight.  But as John Steinbeck wrote, even the “best-laid plans of mice and men oft go astray.”