It was a travel day, coming back to Seattle from Chicago for the holidays. Andrea had handled most of the intense packing the night before (and crammed a good chunk of Christmas bounty in our luggage in the process), so we weren’t in a big hurry leading up to the flight. For lunch we ate leftovers from the previous night’s trip to Wok ‘n Fire (which was a whole different adventure, replete with impatient Tyler and expensive sushi rolls).
We’d had a great holiday trip. Of course we loved the Vitale family Christmas party. We visited Great-Grandpa. We went to the Museum of Science and Industry to see the Dr. Seuss exhibit with Grammy, Grandpa, Auntie Kristi, Wayne, Kim, and Bennett (Bennett and Ty finally got to meet in person). We got to go to ENO for wine and Michael Jordan’s Steakhouse, which was good but crazy expensive. Also totally worth it for a no kids date night. We used a Groupon to stay at the Allerton hotel (bleh) near Water Tower Place. We even got to go to United Center to watch the Illini men’s basketball team (though they sadly took their first loss of the season to UNLV). Tyler learned to open presents for the very first time (a skill he would repeat happily moving forward).
We flew out of Chicago in the afternoon of Tuesday Dec 20. We met a girl on the plane who’d grown up with her parents in Magnolia and headed off to Columbia College in Chicago to study photography. She’d cleverly smuggled her cat onto the plane in a very non-cat carrier looking bag, saving herself the $100. We didn’t really talk to her much, and she spent most of the time sleeping while we spent most of the time keeping Tyler glued to his favorite Pixar movie, Monsters, Inc. We watched it, Frosty the Snowman, and Disneyland Fun on both the slate Matt borrowed for the trip from work (which never did quite get touch working in the PR build…grr) and Matt’s work laptop. We had no hesitations about keeping Tyler completely enamored with movies the entire time. No orange juice this leg of the flight; Ty’s first ever major diaper rash on the way there was a minor disaster. Ty was an extremely good boy and made friends with the little 6 yr. old girl across the aisle…she shared his love of Frosty and hadn’t been to Disneyland yet. One of the flight attendants had a son named Tyler…although he was 21 years old.
We landed back in Seattle that evening. Pat came and picked us up. The car seat was nowhere to be found…as it turns out the oversized baggage for Alaskan didn’t come out at the oversize baggage pick up right next to our belt, but a claim and a half away instead. Oops…took Matt a little bit to figure that on out. Our row-mate from the flight had the same problem with her oversized bag.
We picked up Skippers drive-thru on the way home and caught up on the recorded shows we’d missed (including the Biggest Loser season finale; John deserved to win, and we liked Antone, too). Ty went to sleep pretty quickly when we got home and was clearly exhausted.
Andrea headed off to use the restroom and thought why not use one of the Clearblue pregnancy tests we’d picked up recently? After all, Nov 13 was the last start and we were a bit behind at Dec 20. We certainly wanted to grow our family again but couldn’t say we were particularl…Huh…no s. May be another August special event…
matt & andrea 