Florida from Brooklyn

I find it a bit sad, but I'm declaring an amnesty again, so that I don't stop writing because I missed a few days. I tend to miss one day and then feel guilty and keep skipping and that's how I didn't blog for months and months the last time. So...

Florida was actually pretty awesome. Seeing my dad happy was really pretty cool. He held X a total of three times, all of them instigated by J or me, but he talked about how cool a kid he was and what a good baby all the time and mentioned several times that he thought I was a wonderful mother. I've had a difficult relationship with my father over my teenage years and beyond and it is nice to be slowly digging out and starting over.

We spent two days in Jacksonville during the trip visiting my college friend and our former commune member I, who was so excited about X. It was really sweet to see her interact with X. She really is the perfect Auntie. Every kid needs someone who thinks they are miraculous and special (who isn't Mom!) On the way to Jacksonville, we recreated part of our honeymoon trip up the east coast of Florida. We stopped in Meibourne and Daytona Beach.

X coped very well, all things considered. We were on the road from 10am to 8pm, and although we stopped frequently, that was really asking a lot of him. At the end of the trip at 7pm, we ran out of bottle (on car trips, we bring bottles of expressed breast milk, so he can eat while I drive) in the middle of his snack and he started screaming so loudly that we couldn't hear each other talk. I had to pull off the highway, park at the gas station and nurse him in the back seat of the car in order to calm him down and get him to stop screaming. But he did stop screaming and fall asleep for the night, so it ended well.

X also got to meet his Great Uncle A, my father's brother, who was in Florida at the same time we were. He lives in Michigan, on one of the great lakes, so this is his yearly retreat from the cold weather. He was enchanted with X and held him many times and wanted to take infinite pictures.

We flew back to Brooklyn tonight and got in a few hours ago. I don't like flying and we had to circle JFK for 45 minutes before landing, which I was not thrilled with, but now I don't have to fly again until August when we do our west coast trip. I need to work on the flying thing before X notices my anxiety. Ah, more things to work on.