Florida, Part 1

All the bags are packed and we're ready to go!  We drove down to Roanoke late Tuesday evening and met my parents at a hotel near the airport. We attempted to get everyone to bed by 8, but it didn't really work out because everyone was so excited!  And then Ken and I were not really able to go to sleep at 8:00 but couldn't do anything else or we would wake up the kids!
Our flight left at 6:20 am, so we woke up around 4:00 and got ready.  We piled some very sleepy (and slightly confused) kids into the van and headed off to the airport.

 When we got to the airport, we unpacked the luggage and I went to check in while Ken went to park.  We had quite a system for getting sleepy kids through the airport. It involved them each pulling their own suitcase.  It was a good thing that there were so excited at this point!  We got checked in and went through security and then we went to the gate to wait.  My mom had packed us some breakfast that managed to make it through security despite that fact that, in a moment of utter stupidity, I told the security agent that I had "no idea what was in that bag, my mom packed it!"  Luckily, it survived security and she had packed us apple juice and hard boiled eggs.

The kids looked out the windows and the planes on the tarmac and were very excited to see all the trucks that we had read about out there doing their jobs in the dark.

 And of course, anything that got Henry excited made Benjamin excited too!

We finally boarded our flight and got to our seats in the back of the plane. Because of the size of this plane we were seated with Benjamin and me in front of Frances and Henry who were in front of Ken.  Benjamin was nice and calm sitting in his carseat, so I am really glad we brought that instead of holding him in one of our laps.

 I peeked through the seats quite a bit to check on Frances and Henry and tried explaining the take off procedure to them. Thankfully that was another topic that had been covered by one of our books (Here's to working in a library!!)  All of us were rather excited for the takeoff and watching the lights out the windows.  We got to watch the sun rise shortly after we took off.  We also had fun playing with some stickers I had gotten from the clearance rack at Target.

Just as aside, Frances wore that mustache all the way across the Atlanta airport on our way to our connecting flight.  She got quite a few strange looks, but I don't think she really noticed!
A nice man on our flight offered to take a family picture for us.  Henry refused to cooperate and Benjamin was still buckled in, but it was a nice offer, anyway.

Stay tuned for part 2...