On Saturday we flew to Colorado for a family reunion with Clark, Swathi, Soren, Sruthi, and my cousins and their kids: Benjie, Janine, Pao and Liem.
The kids were so, so excited to be traveling. Mary was blowing kisses to all of us, and Lydia was grinning ear to ear and telling people how much she loved them. Ammon was even thrilled because Abe put him in a forward facing car seat, and he loved his new situation.
I was really nervous about flying for a lot of reasons, but top of the list was that I had no idea how Ammon would manage being constrained for even the very short flight between SLC and Denver. Before we flew I went to Target and raided the junk section of the store for activity books and snacks, and we charged three tablets on top of that.
On the flight, Ammon did great! Once we strapped him in, he seemed to understand that he wasn’t allowed to act crazy anymore, and we kept him entertained the entire time. At any given moment Abe was covering him in stickers and helping Ammon color while Ammon was simultaneously poking at a device, sucking on his bottle and downing snacks–a perfect recipe to encourage Ammon to develop ADD. Good thing the flight was so short!
When we arrived in Denver, we walked through the huge airport, procured our rental car, and drove to Estes Park. I had called ahead to get two enormous Subway sandwich platters for everyone’s dinner. Abe laughed when he saw the giant platters and said it was the Filipino in me. I am always terrified that we will run out of food, so I buy a LOT. Now we have about twenty leftover sandwiches in the fridge.
After we had a picnic by the stream behind the Estes Park WorldMark where we are staying, we decompressed a little bit before heading into Estes Park to walk around, get ice cream, and go grocery shopping. Driving into Estes Park from Denver we saw a whole herd of Elk cows in the downtown park all grazing around a statue of an Elk. As my mom said, they knew right where they belonged! On our way into town after dinner, a male elk with a new antler rack meandered right next to our car, and right after that we had to swerve to avoid a crow eating a fuzzy dead rabbit in front of our car.
It has been an exciting trip so far!