texas trip: days 1-3

We started our trip to Texas early in the morning, but not obscenely so.  A friend of ours picked us up at 6:30am and we headed to the airport, about a 45-minute drive.  During that time Jed managed to pull off one of his shoes, which then got left in the car.  Grrr.  I was glad I had packed another pair of shoes!

At the airport I realized one of his shoes was gone!

I was rather impressed with myself for managing everything alone.  I had a backpack, a baby in a stroller, a large rolling suitcase, a small rolling suitcase, and a car seat.  And only 2 hands.  Here is how I pulled it off:

The stroller with one hand, the 2 suitcases and car seat with the other.  Luckily I only had to make it through the line to the ticketing desk with everything (I was too worried about not forgetting anything, and didn't think about curbside check-in until I was halfway through the line), then I had only myself, the backpack, the baby, and the stroller to take through security (which was its own challenge!).  But the moral of the story is that I am Superwoman. (Yes, Jenete, I know you have done this alone with 2 children.  You are Superwoman squared.)

Jed did fine on the plane, making friends with people around us and generally content.  He took a nap and woke up with the most awesome hair:

Luckily, he wasn't on the way to a date or job interview.  My mom and brother Timothy picked us up from the airport in Austin, and we stopped by a thrift store to look for shoes and a summer hat for Jed (no luck) on the way home.  Jed loved being at Grannie's house.  He was fascinated by her two large dogs, though only from a distance - if they got too close he looked terrified and began to cry.  Over the course of the week he became less frightened, and became more annoyed than scared when Thor tried to lick his face.

On Saturday we went downtown to do a scavenger hunt, hosted by Cityscape.  It was set up as a competition, where you participated in teams of 2 and raced to finish.  We did it as a family outing though, and worked together to just finish at all - we weren't trying to finish first (which was good - with 5 adults and a baby we were VERY slow). We were given a few clues to start with, and were given more along the way as we completed some.  Most of them required us to go somewhere or find something and get a picture of our team in front of that object/with that person/doing that activity.

Here are some pictures from the day:

Though we all worked together, we technically had to split into 2 teams.
Timothy and I were together, and we called ourselves T-squared.  Jed joined us later.

We had to ask random strangers to help with a couple of the assignments.

Austin loves its food trucks, and we had to find one and order food from it. Everyone on our
team had to join in, so we gave Jed the root beer bottle.  He did not actually drink any.

It was a tiring day but lots of fun!