Friday, Saturday, Sunday: Four States in Three Days

Friday started in Orlando, as we checked out and handed over our checked baggage to the hotel people. They saw to it that it would get to our final destination. How awesome is that?

My mom and son and I tried the hotel's arcade as we used up some time between checking out and the airport shuttle. Cass didn't get it so much.

A moment at Orlando's airport pierced me in the heart like a javelin, though. My mom was in a different line, but we were flying together to Phoenix, with Cass and I heading to OKC for (other) grandma's birthday party.

I was getting everything together to go through the X-ray machine. I had my shoes on the platform and was frantically looking for my Paperwhite so I could put it in the tray and try and forgo the annoyance of an extended search. (A Paperwhite is a type a Kindle. I bought it as a gift erroneously and didn't return it in time, so now it's mine. It's pretty sweet, I must say. I thought it wanted to replace books, but it makes me want more books.)

Anyway, I can't find the damn thing and Cass is starting to freak out. He wants to be like daddy and take his shoes off, too. But these are his hightop Mickey Mouse shoes (brought along specifically for this trip) which he can't quite get off his feet.

Of course Toddlers don't have to remove their shoes. I give up looking for the Kindle as the line backs up, pick up Cass who goes from mild freak out to initial meltdown phase and head through the family metal detector, telling him Don't worry about it, your shoes are fine, it's okay...all to no avail.

The hitting and glasses-smacking and hair-pulling commences as I try to get all our stuff from the machine...

It's funny: There are lots of words here to describe this, and yet, none of it seems out of the ordinary to me. These are regular things in the life of toddler-parenting.

We make it to one of the benches where adults re-arrange themselves, and I'm beginning to lose my cool. This is early on day seven of muggy one-hundo-percent-daddy-time. "Fine!" I say to him with a bit of exasperated sharpness. "I'll take your shoes off! And then we can put right 'em back on! Right here!"

He's crying and I'm asking myself What the hell are you doing, yelling at him right now...he hasn't eaten regularly or slept normally for a whole week, it's not his fault. Through his tears he looks at me and says, "I'm trying daddy, I'm trying..."

I almost burst into tears. I crashed to my haunches and took him in my arms and told him everything was okay, that I was SO proud on him, that he didn't need to try to do anything more for me. I get emotional now just thinking about it.

It took me a while to realize that he wasn't saying I'm trying, what he was saying, because he has troubles with his kappa, the hard-K sound, what he was saying was more of the declaration "I'm crying daddy, I'm crying..." Which...seems slightly less heartbreaking to me.

Anyway, here he is at the Phoenix airport as we waited for the flight to Oklahoma City:

We made it in around midnight Oklahoma time, so 1 am for us. It was...rough.

The next day we had grandma Carol's birthday party in the afternoon and evening at Corrie's brother Pete's house, where someone besides his cousins and aunties could hold the Boy:

With Grandpa Ron

The OKC skyline seems bigger than I last remember:

Breakfast the next morning was rowdy, as 18 showed up at a diner. They stacked a bunch of tables down the center of the dining room and had no issues with handing out seven checks.

Have you ever worked in the industry? I have. Those folks were baller-ass superstars, and since most everyone who had their own check had worked in restaurants, I'm sure the collection of tips was, eh, above-average.

It felt like not enough time, because after breakfast we went right to the airport. A few more hours and we were back in LA:

Florida, Arizona, Oklahoma, and California in three days.

Our jet-setting boy...