Midnight Plane to Georgia

The red-eye was a great success! On Tuesday we went to work and daycare as usual. A friend and I picked up Jacob and drove to the airport, where we met up with Chris. The friend then took our car home so we didn’t have to pay for parking at the airport. Also, we are flying back in to San Jose instead of San Francisco - so having our car at the San Francisco airport would have been thoroughly inconvenient. We got through security and on the plane without incident. We actually took Jacob’s brand new car seat with us on the plane which worked really well. The seat folds relatively flat and has straps so it can be carried on your back or over your shoulder and it is narrow enough to fit into standard airplane seats. We figured this would help Jacob sleep better. (We actually looked into something called the CARE system - which is basically straps you can use on an airplane seat so you can have a chest harness without bringing a carseat, but Jacob is already too tall for it!) We got on the plane and got settled and shortly after takeoff Jacob fell asleep. I gave Alex a bottle and put him in the moby wrap, strapped to my chest and he fell asleep. Other than a couple of startles and what seemed like the beginning of a cold during the flight, he slept through everything. I slept some, but not great and Chris didn’t sleep much at all - but he expected that since he generally doesn’t sleep well on planes.

In Miami our second flight was delayed for maintenance issues. Luckily, our gate was laid out such that we had a little escalator from the main level and Jacob and I spent the extra 20 minutes or so going up and down the escalators and stairs. Our second plane was really small so it didn’t fit the car seat, but it also was only about half full and once we were in the air it went smoothly as well. By the time we got to Jacksonville, however,  Jacob had reached the point of exhaustion where he basically stops listening to me and just keeps moving. We all made it to the rental car eventually and once strapped in he got to sleep for a couple hours until we made it to our ultimate destination.

All in all the red-eye was a huge success. I never even had to pull out any toys, activities, or food from my bag. As an extra bonus - there was no issue with jet lag. After spending some time at the beach in the afternoon, Jacob crashed hard around 8 - which is his normal bedtime. He was so tired that we had an unprecedented falling asleep before the end of his books.