East Coast Swing

For his first plane ride Chase chose the red-eye from Portland to Newark. It was a good choice, he slept four out of the six hours we were in the air. The bad part was that his parents and grandparents were dead tired the next day. But we all survived.

The fam visited Megan's relatives during the week of the Forth of July. It was a very relaxing trip for me and also nice to get to spend so much time with my son.

Chase got to meet a lot of his family for the first time. Aunts, uncles, great uncles, great aunts...

Including his cousin Conner...

Chase isn't very good at sharing...

He also learned some music appreciation...

Flying with a baby was not nearly as bad as I had feared. In fact there are some bonuses. The first of which is that you get to board the plane early. This is a huge advantage because we never check any bags, we got first access to the overhead bins. The second is that it gave Megan and I an excuse to walk up and down the aisle burping and entertaining Chase. The downsides is how cramped it was. Fortunately we sat next to some very gracious people who gave lots of compliments about the behavior of our child. It's really nice to hear, even though we didn't have anything to do with it.

Driving in the car has been the biggest struggle so far. Chase doesn't really like to be in a car seat for more that twenty minutes. We're not sure if he gets car sick or if he's just cranky. We tried to time all of our car trips around his naps. The key to travelling this way is flexibility. We rarely told anyone that we would be meeting them at a certain time. Mostly though we tried to have people come to Meg's parents house.

All in all it was a very good trip. Now it's back to work :(