A little too much travel...

Well, we made it back from a fun Thanksgiving 600 miles from home...

My family all had a great time and my son now has decided what he wants from Santa (he also totally seems to get the Santa concept, which is ironic as this is the first time in three Christmases he's not going to actually sit on Santa's lap most likely).  He has consistently been asking Santa (on TV) that he wants a putting green.  He got this bright idea after spending a lot of time in the golf store while his Daddy was shopping for golf clubs.  It's really kind of amazing how we have no problem getting him out of toy stores (without buying anything to boot), but to get him out of an athletic facility... That's another tale.

He is cracking us up all the time, instead of Hickory, Dickory, Dock, the mouse ran up the clock, he likes to say, "Hickory, Dickory, Dock, the cow ran up the Mooooon."  He cracks himself up with this too.  This is a combination of him loving the crescent moon and rhymes.  Yes, he thanks Jesus for the crescent moon fairly regularly and is quite disappointed by clouds.  His sense of humor really seems to be emerging and he really is kind of funny.  He loves to listen to what mommy and daddy are saying and soak it up, and then spit it out, so far not at awkward times, but I"m sure that's coming soon.

On our way back from our trip, about 6 hours into it and after my son's only nap (it was only 30 minutes), he awoke unconsolable.  My husband tried to pull over, and then we found that we were at the only exit around that took an additional 3 miles to get to a spot to pull over.  It was painful for everyone.  It took a while to get him to a point where he was calm enough to express his frustration.  I pulled him out and just tried to calm him.  Finally, he told me, "Need to get back in car seat.  Need to go in car seat and go to (my) house."  He was upset and frustrated by travel.  Boy, could I relate.  He knew he needed to get into his car seat and that was the way we would get back to his house, his room, his basketball.  He was done with this whole being stuck in the car thing.  I mean really, how many books can a 2 1/2 year old look through.  He hung in there and we continued on our journey.

A distance still left to travel in our trip, we were going by the SmithsonianAir and Space Museum.  As I said the name, "Udvar-Hazy", my son said, "Air and Space Museum".  Who on earth would recognize the name Udvary Hazy?  He did.  He then went on to say, "Balls, big balls."  I said, "you mean airplanes and space ship?".  "Big balls, they have big balls there."  I dug back in my memory and remembered, we were there about 6 months ago and the thing he was most fascinated by was not the space ship or all the airplanes, but these big balls, (maybe 5 feet by 5 feet or larger) that were used for satellites or supplies, or something.  He loved looking at those.  For the next half hour or so, he kept talking about wanting those big balls, want big balls, go play with big balls.  It was quite entertaining.

As we got closer to home, we were on the midst of another meltdown.  My husband and I resorted to singing about our son's home to the tune of O' Christmas Tree.  Boy, I'm glad we aren't on a reality show and there was no recording of that, but we kind of all cracked up to the tune and all of the things we sang about about our son's home, our home.  Boy, it felt good to be home again...