Saturday, April 17, 2010

Traveling with a toddler, no es lo mismo los tres mosqueteros que 20 años después

We arrived safe and sound in Mexico, but it wasn't the easy ride I was hoping for. Traveling with an active, "spirited" toddler is not the same as traveling with a 6 month old baby! First Santi barfed all over him, me, and the taxi that took us to the airport. Luckily the driver was very nice and patient (and I tipped him pretty well). Then I discovered that all Santi wanted to do at the airport was run all over the place. And he did NOT want to hold my hand. That just made him annoyed. I finally distracted him by carrying him around to see the display windows at the Cartier and Swarovski stores (shiny things, you know).

On the plane, luckily the flight attendants got the woman next to me to take a different seat so that I could have hers for Santi. We were the window and middle seat of the bulkhead row and that worked out pretty well. The man sitting on the aisle was a grandfather and very patient with Santi constantly going up to him and flashing his most charming smile while offering him one of his toys for the hundreth time. Santi was very antsy and we ended up doing laps of the the aisles on both sides of the plane. He had a hard time sleeping on my lap (he's too big now), so I laid him down on pillows on the floor of our bulkhead aisle. I'm not looking forward to our flight back, especially if we're in a full row next time.

Mexico is great. Except for today, it has been nice and sunny. Santi has been charming the pants off of all of the students of the friend we are staying with (she's an artist and her workshop for teaching is in her house). He's annoying the hell out of her cats though. I'm afraid his ear infection may be making a come back, so I'm keeping an eye on that.

We leave for the field site tomorrow. Well, we hope so. Our car's battery is dead, so we'll have to see what we can do in the morning.

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