Stop 1: San Francisco Bay Area

Judy helping Charlotte to walk.

Crawling with Bob. With Kathy and Bob (and Suzy, the doll). "So you walk on those things?" Charlotte was fascinated by Skylar's walking ability. They meet at long last: Abigail Marie and Charlotte Marie!

I can’t say that I recommend traveling with an 11-month-old. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’d advise against it. But hey, we had a lot of fun, so apparently flying with the wiggliest toddler-to-be on the planet is worth it!

On December 16th, we traveled to our first stop on our West Coast Extravaganza—the San Francisco Bay area. I won’t lie—our trip got off to an exceedingly rocky start. On travel day, it began snowing. Quite a bit, really. Schools let out early and people escaped from work, creating rush-hour-in-snow by early afternoon. Fortunately, we flew out of Dulles, which is a huge airport and it seems they have enough personnel to keep runways clear. Our flight, so far, wasn’t delayed. Of course, that created the problem of actually getting to the airport in time. Our town car (it’s cheaper than a cab if you dwell all the way out in Poolesville) inched its way through the snow to the airport oh so slowly. I nearly had a panic attack in the backseat. Miraculously, we reached the airport in one piece. If we had had to park and trek through snow, we would have missed our flight. As it was, we joined about a hundred other San Francisco passengers who were cutting it just as close as we were. So, as you can imagine, check-in was a bitch. Security was, predictably, an exercise in stupidity and inefficiency, and Charlotte selected that time to decide she absolutely did not want to ride in her stroller for another second. Awesome. We ran through the airport and reached our gate as the flight was boarding. We were very grateful that we made it. Our nerves shot, we naively thought the tough part was over. Once boarded and seated, we were delayed for about 30 or 40 minutes while de-icing took place. Not a significant delay, but any delay with a Charlotte wriggling to get out of your arms seems LONG. Finally, we took off and commenced the almost-6-hour flight. Guess who wanted to crawl instead of sit on Mommy or Daddy’s lap? Guess who cried and screamed when she didn’t get her way? You guessed it. After about an hour of fussing and fighting, Charlotte eventually fell asleep in my arms. Chris and I took this opportunity to buy a couple drinks (it had been a long day) and catch our breath. Because the flight coincided with Charlotte’s bedtime, we had hoped she’d sleep the whole way to San Francisco. HA! She woke up after about an hour. And lord have mercy, that kid was CRANKY. The rest of the flight—all 4 remaining hours of it—involved Chris and me vainly trying to soothe and quiet our fussy, screaming, crying offspring. Oh yes, we were those parents. The ones with the screeching child. The ones who you pray you don’t get seated next to on the plane. The ones you wish would just slip their kid some children’s Benadryl. Finally, Chris took Charlotte to the bathroom under the pretense of changing her, just to give the people around us a break. In the quiet that ensued, I thought about the now 2 ½ hours remaining and started to cry a little. What could we do? We were trapped on a full, cross-country flight. I apologized to the man sitting next to us, and he was very kind about it all. And as I sat there sniffling, a flight attendant came to me with chips and cookies. With a sweet smile she said, “The lady in row 7B bought these for you. She asked me to tell you to hang in there!” I almost cried again because I thought it was the sweetest gesture ever aboard a plane. Several minutes later, Chris returned—without Charlotte. “Missing something?” I asked. “Did you throw her out the plane? Because right now, I might be okay with it—so long as she had a parachute.” Chris smirked. “She’s in the back of the plane, playing with the flight attendants.” “Seriously?” Oh yes, he was serious. And now, allow me to do a promo for Virgin America. I cannot, cannot say enough good things about the Virgin America flight attendants. They were SO sweet to us, from constantly checking in on us, to essentially babysitting our child, to assuring us that the other passengers could just deal with her crying and that we shouldn’t feel bad, to adjusting the temperature for us, to giving us free goodies, to even doing a white lie in our favor when the lady in back of us freaked out about the lack of overhead space. When the attendant asked if people around us could put an additional item under their seats, Chris volunteered the floor space in front of me (he had the diaper bag in front of him). “Nope, you both already have items under your seats,” she lied loudly, eyeing the wiggly baby on my lap and winking at me. I loved her. Anyhoo, after the longest flight of my life, we finally reached San Francisco. And my, all the travel headaches were worth it when, quite late at night, we walked through the door of Judy’s house. Her face lit up at the sight of Charlotte. To say that Judy, a longtime family friend of the Hofmanns, and Charlotte hit it off is an understatement. Charlotte instantly fell in love with her, and I’m quite certain the feeling was mutual. Charlotte adjusted to the 3-hour time difference slowly (we were up at 4:30 with her more than once), but she napped very well throughout the trip—a massive improvement to the sleeping disasters of our Reno/Tahoe trip in July. For the next few days, we met up with (and Charlotte charmed) Bob and Kathy, Chris’s godparents and their granddaughter Skylar, Chris’s buddy Paul, our Oxy friend Meghan, friends Matt and Sara, and friends Chrystal and Marcus, whose adorable daughter, Abigail Marie, is almost an exact year older than Charlotte. We had been meaning to introduce these two little girls FOREVER, and it finally happened! Although Abbey is twice the size of Charlotte (no small feat, believe me), Charlotte instantly ticked off her new friend by stealing her baby doll—when she had the choice of about 7,437 other toys to choose from. Abbey seemed to (eventually) forgive her, but she was a bit wary of Charlotte from then on. We never made it into the city, which was a bit of a bummer, but there really wasn’t time. Besides, it rained and rained the whole time we were there, so what was the point? (Don’t worry, the rain didn’t dampen our fun!) We did, however, get a chance to enjoy some West Coast sushi, which is vastly superior to the crap they call sushi here on the East Coast. We loved, loved, loved having the opportunity to see so many friends, but it was time to leave a bit sooner than we expected. Our next stop (and next blog post)? Lake Tahoe!