We survived our first trip with Jack! We spent two and a half weeks in England. It was a lot of firsts for Jack: first plane ride, first snow, first real illness. I think there is some kind of law kids must get sick on vacation.
Despite that, the trip went very well. We spent almost the whole time at Chris’s parents’ house near Nottingham (which is roughly in the center of England), apart from two nights in a hotel. It was a very different kind of trip. Usually we spend about half of the time with family, and half the time traipising around the country. This was much mellower.
It also snowed, which pretty much shut down the whole country for a bit. It was the worst snow in 18 years, which wasn’t actually that much snow; just more than the country is used to handling.
Chris and I got to go out to a movie on our own (Slumdog Millionare… excellent!) and out for dinner while his parents babysat, which was great. We saw Jack’s great-grandmother, two great aunts, a great uncle, two uncles, an aunt, three cousins, and three of Chris’s cousins.
It took about 4 nights for Jack to get over his jet lag. It might have gone quicker if we all hadn’t acidentally slept in til noon one day! After that he slept very well (except when he was sick and when he was in the hotels). He slept in the cot (that’s what they call a crib in the UK) that Chris and his brothers had slept in, and he went out in the pram that his younger brother Jon used 35 years ago!
The plane flights went ok. We had a third seat thanks to frequent flier miles, and put his car seat there. He slept a fair amount on the flight over, but did have a crying jag mid-flight. We walked him around a while, and put him back in his seat and Chris got him to go back to sleep eventually. After that he slept through the descent and all the way to customs. The flight home had less crying, but it was tougher in some ways because he was awake much of the 10 and a half hours so we had to do a lot of entertaining. I nursed him a lot on the plane, during takeoff and to try and help him get to sleep.
Overall he did a great job with being in a new place, meeting all sorts of new people, and generally being dragged around. He started a couple of new teeth (now he has two bottom, two top, and two more coming in on the bottom) and likes to practice walking (with us holding his hands).
I was so glad he got to spend so much time with Chris’s parents. They were wonderful with him.
I’ll probably write a separate post about Jack’s illness, but the short version is that he had a fever for a few days (104.6.. eek) and then got better, then broke out in a rash. We visited a walk-in clinic which was FREE despite being visitors (thank you National Health Service!)
All in all a very good trip. I’ll try and get the rest of the pictures on-line soon.
