It started at 7am, when I biked to Sarah's to drop off a check and then to work. I was darn proud of myself - 3.5 miles in about 20 minutes! I was channelling my colleague, a botanist, who is a total badass on a bike. Got to work, graded midterms. Difficult because it was a lot of opinion-based stuff and it's hard to grade people's opinions. Especially when you don't like them. And you can't really write "you're an idiot" in red pen across people's answers. Ok, I guess I could, but you're probably not supposed to. It's probably in a faculty handbook somewhere. Anyway, got together some stuff to work on while I'm up here, sent myself some files, and decided to go home. And then realized that the weatherpeople LIED. It was not 75 degrees out. It was 60 and raining. And I'm not ready to tackle biking in that, so Dave and Ian picked me up - in the car. I got a sweatshirt, Dave drove me back to the office and I biked home. Silly me - I should have known never to leave home without my sweatshirt. In May.
Anyway, I had solicited advice from my FB friends on flying with a 15 month old that didn't involve duct tape or putting him in a pet carrier and checking him like luggage. Lots of great suggestions - one of them was Benedryl. I never knew you could just use it recreationally for babies - well, you know what I mean. Anyway, called our ped to ask about it and get a dosage and he was cool with it. Yay!! Visions of a perfectly behaved, sleeping child on the longer flight from Milwaukee to La Guardia filled my head! This was going to be awesome! Yeah, I was warned to try it out first because it could make him crazy instead of sleepy and God knows we don't want to unleash the crazy at 40,000 feet. So, chock full of hope, we gave Ian a test dose. The nurse said it would take about 30 minutes to kick in. We felt like we were conducting an experiment. We noted the time of dose and monitored his behavior with respect to time. Was he getting sleepy? Did he seem a little less coordinated, kinda like we'd slipped him a mickey? At 30 minutes. we put him in his crib. He fell asleep. Success!! This crap works on our kid!! And 20 minutes later...he was wide awake. Not nuts, thankfully, but we concluded that at this age, he is immune to benedryl. If he'd been a mouse, I would've tried a larger dose the next day, but since he can't sign IRB paperwork yet, I decided not to experiment with dosage. We'd have to do this the old-fashioned way. With new games for the iPad.
So, we showed Hanna, our awesome house-sitter and my grad student, around, repeatedly uttering phrases like "we're going to clean this up". After Hanna left, we got Ian to bed and cleaned like crazy so that she wouldn't be house-sitting in complete filth. We also packed. 3 people, 1 suitcase, 48 pounds - beat that! Ok, and 3 carryons containing a laptop, a Kindle, an iPad, a new coloring book and crayons, a doodle pad, some wooden toy puzzle-y thing, and 6 lbs of homemade "trail mix" that I made with puffs and cereal. And a baba, as total bribery during the flights.
I'm tired, but stay tuned tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion the
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