As Agnes wrote about in her blog entry “Cross-Country Travel with Infant Twins—The Aftermath”, we finally took our trip cross-country to attend Sean and Peggy’s wedding. Agnes covered most of what it was like to travel with the girls, but I thought I would add a few things.
Flying with the girls was quite a challenge–the girls just didn’t want to sleep. We ended up needing to entertain them during the whole flight, which really wore down both of us. I started holding Eleanor up so that she could scramble up my body and peer over the back of my seat. The people in back of me seemed willing to play with her for a bit. We also tried playing games with them, giving them different things to hold, walking them up and down the aisle, and singing to them (John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt is pretty good for repeating over and over when you’re tired). No one activity seemed to occupy them for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, and this continued for pretty much the entire flight. Fortunately, they never completely freaked out and the people on the plane around us said that the girls did quite well.
I found the hotel rooms to be pretty much baby-proof for kids our girls’ age. When they’re a little bit older, we’ll need to worry about covering electrical sockets, but for the most part we were fine having the girls explore the room once they were placed on the floor. Miranda got up under the sink and was playing with the plumbing, but I don’t think there was anything dangerous under there.
We ended up washing the girls directly in the bathtub. Naturally, we didn’t bring the girls’ tub with us, but since they’ve been sitting for their baths recently, we were hoping they would do okay in the bathtub itself. Eleanor was the first one to get a bath when we arrived. When we put her in the water, she started crying and acting like she was scared. It was a pretty quick bath. Miranda didn’t seem particularly concerned, but she kept on trying to move and so she was slipping and sliding everywhere. From the second night onward, everything seemed to go a lot smoother.
At the wedding itself, we knew that we needed to be ready to walk away from the ceremony with the girls if they started making too much noise. What I didn’t count on was that Miranda would decide to blow raspberries during pretty much the entire ceremony. It was kind of embarassing when Sean and Peggy were saying their vows to each other. We were in the back so I hope we weren’t too distracting.
Overall, the trip was hard, but I am still glad that we went. We especially owe a thanks to Anne and Terry for buying us a bunch of supplies out there.