In two and a half short weeks I will be walking out of the plane into the African sunshine. The time of departure is almost upon us. Now while there are many things I am looking forward to, such as the kids seeing G and G Stroebel and their Aunt and Uncle and all of that great stuff. I too am looking forward to the sunshine, the beach and some much needed R&R. Oh-and the great chocolate!
We, the husband and myself, have taken the trip many times, once with a nine month old which was smooth, however this time around might prove to be a little more challenging. There will be two little people, one of which will probably want to talk to everyone and share the contents of her purse with everyone on board (she does that now, we are out someplace with the bag in tow and sure enough, she pops it open and spills it's guts to anyone who will listen) and then the other little person who can't sit still and squirms all over the place in an attempt to get down and keep perfecting his new found talent, yes the boy is finally crawling. Now, it's a flight from here to JFK (in the middle of the night) to arrive at 6am and then spend the entire day waiting for our grueling 18 hour flight at 5:30pm. YIKES! It's going to be a rough one, with not a lot of sleep that's for sure. I feel sorry for any unsuspecting narrow-minded individual who may dare to give me the evil eye when I nurse my child in a public place. An overprotective Mamma with no sleep is not a Mamma you want to cross.
Now is the packing issue. I know that two kids is enough, just them, now I have to take along enough clothes for a three week trip for four of us and try to squeeze it all into a reasonable amount of luggage so we aren't swallowed alive by our suitcases. I'm thinking a pair of short, couple tanks, a swimming costume (or swimsuit as we say in America) and a pair of sandals. Done. But what if we go out to eat, or if it's cold, or if Ethan throws up on me...see...this is the problem. I can pack light if I didn't have any what-ifs floating around in my head. So in the end no matter how much I try to prepare for this trip, I will end up packing too much, we'll be exhausted lugging it around and when it's time to come home we will have bought so much stuff there that we'll have no room to add the new stuff to the old stuff that we shouldn't have taken to begin with. The joys of packing.
The pleasure of the trip will outweigh the pain of the process though.
