Down South Pt. 1: "Can you believe we have children?"

Last Sunday, that would be Sunday, Feb. 26, we took the Lil' Miss down south for her first trip outside central Jersey. The girls picked me up from church after the 10:00 service and we knew that we were going to be cutting it close on time. We had to get to Philly, park our car, ride the shuttle, check in and figure out how to navigate the security mess with Greta in her Baby Bjorn. If you don't know what a Baby Bjorn is, it's a baby carrier that turns mom or dad into a marsupial. Anyway, we knew it was going to be quite an ordeal. Everything was going fine on the way down until we came to a dead stop on the six-lane highway that runs on the Jersey side of Phila. We sat there for an hour waiting for an accident to be cleared and during that time Greta decided that she was hungry and she wasn't going to stop screaming until I crawled in the backseat and fed her a bottle. Thankfully Eleanor and one pumped already and I was able to calm Greta. And that was the only drama for the rest of the day from her. We managed to get out of Philla. before the snow storm reached its peak. Greta was a champ on the airplane. She was so quiet that the flight attendant walked past her multiple times before noticing her. When the attendant did finally notice her she said, "Oh my! Where did you come from?" I couldn't resist the opportunity to be a smart aleck. I said, "I could tell you where she came from, but I think I'd embarrass you in front of all these people." She didn't get the joke and walked off. Oh well.

We got to Atlanta without any problems, but when we were in the Avis line, Eleanor spoke to a woman who said all flights to NYC were cancelled until Tuesday due to the storm back home. We were very lucky. The lady at the Avis counter asked me if I wanted to pre-purchase a tank of gas from Avis for $2.18/gallon. I asked her what gas cost outside and she said $2.35. I smirked and said no thanks knowing that gas back in Jersey was at $2.09 when we left so I figured that I'd be able to do much better than $2.18 somewhere during the next six days. Well apparently she didn't like some Yankee smirking at her because when the Avis shuttle dropped us off at our car (which was supposed to be a Ford Taurus or similar) we saw our shiny, new, gas guzzling SUV. Sure, it was a Saturn Vue with better gas mileage than a Hummer, but it wasn't great especially considering how much driving we'd be doing. We got the car seat hooked in and headed up to Marietta to visit our friends the Hunekes.

Tom is one of my two best buddies from high school who now lives in GA with his wife, Melissa and their son, Nathan. They asked us back in January if we'd be Nathan's godparents. We were honored and of course we said yes. Nathan's baptism was on Monday morning and we were looking forward to spending Sunday night and all day and night Monday with them. The baptism was beautiful and Nathan seemed to really enjoy it.

Later that day the six of us took a walk and went out to dinner. It was a great time, but at some point that evening I looked at Tom as we both had our kids sitting on our laps and I said "Can you believe we have children?" "No." Let me tell you, a lot has gone done since 1996 when Tommy and I were at Edina H.S.