Travelin'

So we sent Jon's family home on Thursday afternoon and we took off for Utah on Saturday morning.
We have been up since 5 am and on the plane ride wasn't the best one, even with Jon being there. I'm not saying that Jon wasn't helpful. He was extremely helpful. If I would have had to deal with Alex for all 3 hours, I may have gotten off that first flight in tears.
I know some of you probably have flown with an 18 month old and I'll quickly tell you that it was MUCH easier flying with him before he could walk. Today I got poked in the eye by a handful of crayons, ate 2 soggy animal crackers, was told no 1000 times, was kicked, heard a lot of whining, enjoyed flashes of light as the window shade was opened and closed (and crying when he couldn't get it open), and had my arms wiggled out of too many times to count. I also got to try to figure out how to keep a little boy from from screaming, but still making sure he wasn't doing annoying things (like kicking seats or running up and down the aisle or opening and closing the window shade or slamming the pull down tray up and down or putting the arm rests loudly up and down (including trying to keep him from pushing down the ones from the seat in front of us).
All of my tricks that I thought would work lasted 5 minutes each. Baby Signing times, One Fish Two Fish (and many other books), Elmo magnets, cars, cookies, and the binkie and blankie I thought for sure would get us through 3 hours. It didn't. We read part of one book and then he was just sick of all books. We would eat one cookie and then it was no to anymore cookies.
I drugged him toward the end of our first flight and he actually slept for about 1/2 hr. through the second one. AMAZING! But when he woke up he kicked the tray that was down and spilled my cup of ice. Good thing it was just ice. Bad thing was he wasn't going to sleep after that (even though I could tell he wasn't ready to wake up yet).
Needless to say, after an early morning and long trip on the airplane, I really should be in bed right now.
So off I am because nothing sounds better to me than collapsing into bed and falling into a deep sleep. We'll see about the deep thing... Alex is bunked in our room tonight.