Well, here goes nothing. Aimee and I are about to set off on a two month adventure in central Vietnam. And we brought our 9 month old baby. Double adventure.
I'm writing this post as we fly from Tucson to Los Angeles, and it's the first quiet moment I've had in the last 24 hours. Mimi took it upon herself to stay up all night last night to help us flip our day/night cycle a little early. Very thoughtful. The only consolation I could think of as we laid in bed at 11:00, 1:00, 2:00, and 3:30 was that this would increase her chance of sleeping on the plane. Of course, it would also increase her chance of turning into an over-tired super zombie gremlin baby.
But our sleepless night wasn't all Mimi's fault. Aimee and I started packing a week ago, but we were still up way late trying to cut three pounds from our checked bags. I've never cared so much about the weight of baby wipes.
We starting packing earlier than usual because this is both Aimee and my first trip to Asia (1) with a baby (2) requiring 30 hours of travel (3). We didn't want any last minute surprises. But Aimee gets a lot of the credit for the baby travel planning. She has had a very clear-headed view of what we were in for, whereas only yesterday did I realize that Mimi will not, in fact, be sleeping the entire plane ride. Aimee had far more realistic expectations. She and a friend who will be joining us later on this trip with her own family scoured the mommy blog underworld for infant travel tips. Tip #1: Don’t do it. Tip #2: Bring a lot of distractions. But we'll get to that later.
The central motivation for our trip to Vietnam is a public health project that I'll be working on as a sort of capstone to my medical residency. I'll talk more about the medical work in a later post. Or maybe I'll just upload a bunch of photos of us at the beach. We'll see how this all plays out.
But back to this morning. My dad picked us up at 6 am, and I would have felt bad about waking him up early if it didn't give him one more chance to hang out with his granddaughter. It appears as though Aimee and I have both moved beyond the period when our parents worry about us when we travel.
We got to the airport 90 minutes early, and it's a good thing we did. A booking error resulted in our reservation having two infants on it (good God, no), and trying to fix that for an international flight was like asking the airline's computers to divide by zero. Attempt after attempt kept resulting in us not being able to check in. The computer error was forcing us to choose between having a baby on our reservation or having checked bags. For the sake of clearing Vietnamese immigration, we kept Mimi on the ticket, and our bags received hand-written destination labels. Aimee and I both looked at each other as we silently ran through the contents of our checked bags to see if there was anything we couldn't live without for two months. Being that 80% of our checked gear was diapers, we figured that we'd be fine.
We cleared security without too much difficulty. But here's a fun fact: Breakfast burritos set off TSA security flags. Every time. Still worth it.
When we finally made it to the gate, there was another problem with our tickets. But after a brief conversation with the agent, we again got it all worked out. Aimee and I detected a pattern, and braced for a long 30 hours. Here goes nothing.
