Flying with Jake

Jake is an awesome little traveler. It's probably due to a few factors; like his happy demeanor, my preparation, and the fact that he's flown early and often. After all, his first cross-country flight was when he was two months old, and he had been on ten flights by the time when was eight months old. But I was still a little bit nervous heading into our Utah-to-East-Coast flights for our NYC trip. It had been a few months since we'd flown, which meant that Jake was both out of practice and a few months older and more rambunctious.

I shouldn't have been worried at all. Jake was nothing short of perfect on the almost-6-hours of flights to EWR. It was only after we finally landed at our destination that he fussed a tiny bit, and that was only because we wouldn't let him touch the bald man's head in front of us as we were waiting to get off the plane. You can hardly blame him, though -- that thing was so shiny! Jake had probably been eyeing it for awhile. Other than those 10-seconds of no-touching sadness? He was a perfectly behaved, perfectly adorable airplane passenger. We always get a lot of compliments from (relieved) fellow travelers and the stewardesses.

That seat belt lasted approximately 9 seconds before Jake was up and turned around and...

Making friends.

Eating ice chips, playing with ice chips, and laughing as he rubbed ice chips on Mommy.

Cuddles and naps.

The way home was more of the same. We had an extra-long wait in Philadelphia, so we walked clear across five terminals to the USO to hang out for a couple hours. Jake led the way, which led to endless entertainment. There was a musician playing in one terminal and Jake stopped every ten steps to dance for awhile. He was quite the attention magnet and we had multiple people stop to take pictures or make comments about how cute he was. And he kept doing it -- walking a few steps and then stopping to dance/squat dance. By the time I finally whipped out my phone to record him, we were laughing so hard we were crying. The video is below, and you can just imagine a good ten minutes of the same before the video even started.

Lead the way, Jake!

PHL had this cute little kiddie play area, which got some good use from my kiddies.

Jake LOVED the moving walkways. He was so fast!