Our "vacation"

I'm going to try and finish this story before Cole wakes up from his nap but if I don't I'll just post it and finish it later. It's a long one:)

So...Travis decided about a month ago to plan a trip to Wyoming to go ride on the tram that he spent FIVE months building last year. I decided that since he'd be out of town, I'd take Cole to go visit my sister and my mom. No, I didn't think it would be easy going out of town alone with my boy but I had no idea that Murphy's Law would be following me the whole time. We got up the morning of Feb. 19th at 5 am and were at the airport by 5:45am to check in. I had two check on bags, one carry on, Cole's carseat, and Cole (in his carseat). Side note: if you don't have one of these, and you have kids, get one. It made my trip possible! Okay, so I walk up to check my bags and show my id and the lady asks me for proof of Cole's age. Yeah, that's right...I forgot his birth certificate. I explain that he is only 16 months old but she insists that it is policy and if I can't prove his age, I will have to buy another seat on the plane for him ($220). I blurt out that his brithday is 10/13/07 and that I couldn't make it up that fast if it wasn't really his birthday. She smiles and asks if I can have proof for the flight back home and I say 100% for sure. So she hands me my boarding ticket and tells me to have a nice flight (1st crisis averted). By this point, my heart is racing but I'm happy that she didn't charge me for the seat, so I mosy up to our gate and feed Cole bluberries until we board. On the plane, Cole is an angel...for the first hour. For the last 20 minutes of the flight, he was a raving lunatic. Screaming, flailing, snotting, drooling, punching and kicking. He was sick of being confined and his ears were hurting during the descent. I kept apologizing to the people around me but they were all very nice and kept telling me it wasn't my fault and they know how it is. After we finally landed, I got our bags and we headed over in a shuttle to the car rental place. I got the keys, found the car and loaded everything into the trunk. I went to put Cole and his carseat into the car and when I opened the door I was hit in the face with the disgusting smell over cigarette smoke!!! I blurted out, "oh hell no!". I left everything there, except Cole of course, and walked back over tto the main office to get us another car. They obliged and I had to unload, haul over and reload the other car with all of our stuff. I had brought our portable dvd player for Cole to watch in the car, so that he could watch his precious Monsters Inc. and would be happy on the hour and a half car ride to Chico. I had never set up our dvd player in the car before, so I had to read instructions and spend about 20 minutes getting everthing strapped into place and ready to watch. We finally left the car rental place and as we headed out toward the freeway, the dvd screen fell shut and Cole started to have a fit. I should have pulled over but I just reached back and set it up. While I was doing that though, I passed a sign for a freeway and I just assumed it was the one I was supposed to get on. WRONG! After about 5 minutes or so driving on this freeway and having nothing look familiar, I saw that I was on the 5 going north when I was supposed to be on 99. I didn't panick though and figured I would get off at the next exit and flip around. WRONG!! The next exit took me on this FOREVER road that ran parallel to the freeway, still going in the opposite direction! After about 10 minutes on this thing, I was starting to lose it. Finally, it bent back around and I was able to get going in the right direction on the right freeway.

We made it Chico pretty quick and met up with my mom. Then we started the trek up the mountain to her house in Forest Ranch. As we were climbing the hill, wouldn't you know it, the check engine light came on in the rental! We made it though and we figured it was just hard on the car going up the mountain. We had a really great time at my mom's (minus my step-dad's forever menacingly bad attitude). Cole LOVED playing with the horses and dogs and playing in the snow and mud mud mud. There was ALOT of mud and it was cold mud. But Cole was having a blast, so I didn't mind getting dirty right along with him. Unfortunately that night, it was extra cold in the other "wing" of the house (where Cole and I were sleeping) and they left their dog, Eeyore, out and he barked ALL NIGHT LONG. Needless to say, I didn't get any sleep and Cole woke up at 4 in the morning to take a massive dump, so that was fun. Friday afternoon my sister Sarah came up to see us and she stayed the night!! Cole had a blast with her and my mom:) We had a better night sleeping that night because I left Cole downstairs, where it was warm. Sarah and I slept upstairs with lots of blankets and they locked up Eeyore for the night!! The sleep was lovely:)...oh yeah there's more...