Back on-air

Well, hello blog! After a few reminders from Jack's daddy and the lovely Merrikate, we are back. I swore when I returned to this blogging business, there would be reams of catch-up posts from our recent adventures (Spain! Galleries! "Working from home"! Separation Anxiety! Babies being trickier as they get bigger! Um... A whole bunch of other things!!)... but it seems at least one cliché  I heard over and over again in early Mommy-hood is true. You really must record things, because you think that you'll remember them all... but you don't. Or something like that. I heard it way back in early Mommy-hood! How am I supposed to remember?! Another cliché that is proving true is that you really do start to care about and talk about poop. 
But I digress. And a promise is a promise, dear readers, so no poop will be discussed in this blog. Instead, I figured I'd choose today, the day after Jack and I landed on home soil for the first time, to start playing catch-up. Partially because landing on Canadian soil allows me to oh-so-smoothly recap our flight to Spain, which was just as gloriously (relatively speaking of course), smooth as this one. We started off  spending hours and hours wandering Gatwick (a big thank you to Cafe Rouge for providing comfy and discrete booths for breastfeeding and a big, 'oh, come on, Gatwick' for providing nothing of the sort), I realized that waiting for planes was a lot more mellow when all I had to do was read a book and sip on a coffee or glass of wine for hours, I skipped my old standard airport bookshop shopping spree in favour of buying my boy a new book (way more fun in a way, for the record... and besides, I'm lucky to read my Kindle one-handed when wrangling the little one). Then, in the final pre-departure moments Jack shrieked like the babes of Hades in the boarding area, terrifying our fellow passengers and (in a stroke of accidental brilliance) lowering any and all expectations of good behaviour. In Spain, this act had me in tears as I boarded the plane. This time, I just avoided eye contact and calmly boarded the plane. Because I knew (or hoped I knew) something those other people didn't. He was about to go from child of Hades to delivering an in-flight performance worthy of the angels themselves. See, the kid hadn't eaten in hours -- and as soon as we started taxiing and I let him go to town on the formula I was packing, I knew all anyone would hear would be his voracious gobbling down of said formula, no inner-ear pain induced shrieks and then he was almost sure to pass out in a state of blissful milk-drunkenness. Is it nice to bring your child to what he is probably sure is the brink of starvation (like, a whole 2.5 hours without food!) to ensure you hold such a bargaining chip? Maybe not. Is it effective? Happily, yes. I was relieved when it worked on our three-hour flight to Spain. I was amazed when he repeated the feat for our eight-hour flight to Toronto (obviously he cried a bit over the flight -- he's a baby for goodness sake... but nothing resembling his ground performance and never for more than a few minutes). I am delighted to report the kid is a great traveller. Which works out well... cause as a bi-continental babe with Grandparents who clearly adore him on both sides of the pond, he's gonna have to be.