The Wanderlust Chronicles: Home again!

Imagine the scene when you walk out of the international baggage area to the public arrivals room, and there are dozens and dozens of people lined up and gathered waiting anxiously to greet their arriving loved ones. Now imagine Griffin waving at every one of them, huge smile on his face, assuming they were all there to welcome him! It was pretty funny.

Which is good, because the rest of the trip prior to that sure the hell was not!!! (funny, that is). I suppose it could have been worse...at one point I dared to think of the scenarios that could have been worse and yeah, it could have been worse. But essentially, in about 36 hours worth of travel, Griffin barely slept at all, and was a cranky, fussy, crying hot mess. The poor kid just couldn't find his zone to crash asleep no matter what we did, and even when he did finally crash a few times, he just kept getting woken up by something random. I was sort of blogging in my head the whole time, recounting the miserable play-by-play, but too tired to actually write it down. Then once we arrived home, we were so happy to be back in our beds where we could sleep for real, there just didn't seem a good moment to sit and write. But now we are almost a week home now, and things are starting to even out and settle down. Griffin is back on his normal sleep schedule, though he is still unusually clingy and fussy when he's awake. Which could be also associated with....yeah you guessed it....his tooth finally cutting through! By our calculations, it must have cut through the day after we got home. Nice timing. You still can't actually see it, but we can clearly feel a little sharp tooth edge poking out from his gum.

Some choice moments from the trip, other than the arrival welcome fit for a king? Here goes.

- a huge tour group of Chinese who were departing Phuket at the same time we were, and were completely obsessed with Griffin. I'm serious, like every single woman in the huge tour group was swarming around the kid. I've never seen anything like it. I even snapped a couple pictures but it doesn't do justice to the amount of women swarmed around him and cooing.

- the Lufthansa flight attendant gave Griffin a small stuffed Lufthansa airplane plush toy. Griffin was seated in his car seat between Steve and I. He learned how to play ball with the little plus airplane toy- and man did he think it was hilariously fun! Just watch the video clip. The laughter is contagious! (and the flight attendant's announcement in the background is a bit annoying).

- the ball crawl in the play area at Frankfurt airport. Griffin really loves the ball crawl! Lucky for him his Aunt Lynn is already shopping for some ball crawl balls for his birthday. Unfortunately, the Frankfurt airport turned out to be the dirtiest airport we've ever been in. The ball crawl was disgusting so we didn't let him play in it very long. We were in the airport about 7 hours and so we saw several bathrooms, food court and play areas, etc., and they were all totally grimy and disgusting.

- Steve ending up in the middle between Griffin, and a nice woman with her 8 month old daughter sitting on her lap for the entire flight between Frankfurt and Philadelphia. Wow that was a long, miserable 8 hours for that guy. I thought about switching with him but I sat down until that thought went away.....

- Griffin spitting up breastmilk (frankly, there is a fine line between "throwing up" and "spitting up") 3 times while at Frankfurt airport, one time coating the carpeting of a nice cafe, and another time coating me. Luckily I had a change of clothes, though my thoughts around packing yoga pants was for the emergency where our flights get screwed up and we have to spend a night somewhere....not the actually wearing them around in public back up plan.

But alas, we are home and happy. And tired. Still. But happy. And looking forward to Griffin turning one year old this coming Friday! WOW!