Sorry for the little break in the blog, we went on our vacation to Texas. I’ll just sum up our trip in one uber entry and if you want to see pictures, they are here. I stayed up the night before getting everything ready and doing laundry. I had to make a list of stuff to do in the morning, like remember to bring the milk, pack the hammocks, etc. Everything went pretty smoothly and before we knew it, we were at the airport. We didn’t have to wait hardly at all, but we had too many bags. You are only allowed 2 bags per person, and we had 6. OK, before you think “My god, why do you have so many bags?”, let me explain. We had 2 bags for the hammocks, 1 bag for the boys stuff, 1 bag for our stuff, and 2 car seat bases. This is in addition to our 2 carry ons. I didn’t think they would count the car seat bases as a bag since it is light and small and hardly takes up space. But they did. It is totally not fair because our bags were really small and 2 of ours equals one of those big suitcases. Anyways, we got creative and taped the two bases together so it reduced it to 5 bags, and then we were able to stuff all the clothes from our bag in with the hammock bags. So, we avoided the ridiculous $80 charge for extra bags. Now onto the gate! At the security check, it was quite hectic because we had to take the babies out of their car seats, put everything on the xray thing, in addition to taking off all jackets, shoes and what not. What a hassle! When we were at the gate, we were nervous about not having extra seats for the babies, in which case we would have to carry them the whole trip. We didn’t buy extra seats for them, thinking it would be ok. And hey, need to take advantage of free flights for them! I asked the woman about putting us in places so that we have a free seat next to us, but she was so rude and not helpful at all. Saying that the flight would be full due to the long list of stand by’s. I inquired about the next flight leaving 2 hours later and she said that it was totally empty. So, we switched to that flight and hung out at the airport. Sure enough, we had like 3 rows to ourselves! The babies did extremely well, they cried a little at the beginning because they were hungry, so we fed them and they fell asleep for the whole flight. Thank goodness for the car seats! We then got our rental car and drove 3 hours to Trinity. The babies woke up while we went from the airport to the rental car, but once we started driving, they fell asleep again. They just did an amazing job coping with all the activity, we are so proud of them! The rest of the trip was fun, we got to see lots of relatives. Michael’s brother, Denver, and his family came up from California, Michael’s sister and her 2 boys came down from Oklahoma and Michael’s Aunt and Uncle from Castroville (Texas) came for a couple days too. We were amazed at how big our nephews are!!! It’s been 4 years since we’ve seen them last and 4 years is a lot. It was also nice to have night time babysitting, we went to see 3 movies in 3 nights - Wedding Crashers, War of the Worlds, and Bad News Bears. We liked them in that order.

On Monday, we went on a road trip to Austin and brought the boys with us. It has been 9 years since we were last here (since Michael graduated) so we visited lots of old friends. Timing was just perfect, driving was fine, the babies did amazingly well. Our first visit was with people I worked with at Medianet, Lori and Darryl. They still are the same and it’s nice to know that they all still hang out together! We then had a 2nd lunch with the people who helped convince us to move to Austin, Mikal and Chris. It was like we haven’t left and we had so much to talk about. We stayed there really long, and the people were kind of upset because they were closed and wanted to leave. After that, we went to UT and drove around, we didn’t really have time to get out and walk around. Things looked the same, yet different. We then went to visit one of Michael’s friends from UT, Eileen. She recently had a baby as well, and we exchanged emails here and there about our pregnancies and NICU experiences. Her daughter, Erin, is just adorable and it was really fun to watch her crawl around and throw stuff on the ground. We also met her husband, Andrew, and he was really nice too. We had Conan’s pizza and it was delicious! We planned to leave around 7, but we were having so much fun talking that we didn’t leave until 9pm! The boys did well all day and it was only at the last 30 minutes, that they started to really fuss. Elijah was upset because he wasn’t able to get good naps in, I don’t blame him!

The next day (Tuesday), we had another long drive back to Dallas. We left early since we met another friend from UT, April. We were going to meet her for an early dinner, but decided later to just meet at the airport. I was hoping there would be one of those airport restaurants, but the way they have it set up, we had to just sit on some chairs. We got caught up with everything and it was very interesting talking to April about her job as an Audiologist. She recently went on a volunteer trip to Honduras to help the people there. As for the flight, we lucked out again and was able to secure car seats for the boys. Because they are “lap babies”, they reserved us aisle seats. But what we really needed was window seats. So, we just planned to ask the person in our row with the window seat if we could switch. Well, the woman in my row was a real witch and said “No, I really like the window”. Luckily, Michael’s window person never showed up and in the row in front of him, the window person never showed too. Rowan didn’t sleep on this plane, I don’t know why. He hardly slept all day, but yet he was in really good spirits. He had non-stop smiles. Elijah on the other hand, had a hard time, not so much with the flight, but with travelling in general. He had enough! He treasures his naps! The guy sitting next to us was amazed at how well they did, acutally several people commented on how good they were.

Some new milestones that happened while we were there, on Saturday, Elijah turned over from back to front on his own! Of course, it was their first plane trip, first road trip (4 3hr drives).

All in all, a great trip! Back to reality…