Mother's Day at 30,000 Feet

Home Sweet Home. Glad to be back home again. Not looking forward to going to work early in the morning, and taking Eli into the big bad Walker's room at daycare, but glad he'll at least be getting back into a routine.
Vacation was fun, and the wedding was amazing, but the island life was getting a little old. We were hot and sweaty all week...there just wasn't much reprieve from the heat and humidity and sun (and I'm not a hot-weather person, and still got a little burned wearing SPF 30 or 50 the entire time). Eating in restaurants with a squirmy toddler was getting really old. Finding bugs in our hotel room that were bigger than the lizards we found in our hotel room was so not fun (no exaggeration).
The wedding was THE place to be on the island Saturday night. It was held on a secluded 40-acre beachfront estate with a huge villa. We were greeted with rumpunch for the pre-ceremony cocktail hour (complete with steel drum band). The seaside ceremony was lovely of course. The dinner and reception were held under a tent (surrounded by a few bars). A DJ was flown down from DC for quite the beachfront club scene (complete with disco lights, fogger, and bubbles). Watching the over-70 crowd tear up the dance floor to Kanye West next to the young'uns was quite the sight.
Sitters were available inside the villa, so Eli played with another little boy named Eli (what a coinkidink) and ate dinner and eventually crashed with his teddy on the couch an hour and a half past bedtime while we partied and sent scouts in to check on him (he would freak out if he saw us pop in and leave again). We went to get him to leave and say our goodbyes, and Eli was so sleepy and dazed by the loud music and disco lights and distant relatives pinching his cheeks. He slept more in the car, but didn't actually get into his crib until after 11 (so much for bedtime consistancy). He slept in very late, but I woke up early and couldn't fall back to sleep, so I missed out on my rare chance to sleep in late on Mother's Day.
We had Mother's Day brunch with Eli's Grandma and Grandpa Ed, and then headed to the airport. We thought we had the middle seat to ourselves again, but they gave it to a standby passenger, which was really not good for us or anyone else around us. Eli had nowhere to squirm and nowhere to lay down to try to nap, so he was really not happy for much of the 3 1/2 hour ride. Thank goodness for the airfone, which bought us quite a bit of time talking to Eli on pretend calls to his play cell phone, and he loved pushing the airfone buttons. The 5 board books I brought lasted quite a while, although after the 7th reading of "Goodnight Moon" I realized I should have figured out how to pack his entire bookshelf in the diaper bag. Just for some added fun, we hit turbulence several times (including during his in-flight diaper change).
That was probably his last trip as a lap passenger, because I don't think any of us really want to do that again for a flight of any significant duration.