I forgot the second most important rule of air travel with a toddler in a carseat (rule #1 is bring lots of candy and mints). Rule #2 is don’t sit your child behind someone you don’t know unless you want to play foot police for 2 hours as there is something so satisfying about repeatedly thumping heels on the tray table.

I used to be petrified to fly and my family can tell you there were many times when I jumped through ridiculous hoops to avoid getting on a plane. Now I can do it without fear, but I generally dislike it. I’m always tired, but I can’t sleep sitting up, I have no control over where we’re going, and I don’t know what any of the airplane noises or many “dings!” mean so I find myself watching the flight attendants to see if they look concerned. They all must be very well trained because they have the best poker faces.

Josh would say they don’t look worried because there is nothing to worry about, but I always suspect there’s something going down and no one wants to start a panic in coach.

So I’m fine, just a little skeptical of this soda can in the air. The smoother the ride the more relaxed I become. Then we hit a few rogue pockets of air and I’m back on alert. Like just now.

I can’t believe we are moving to another country in the Middle East. It feels like we’re heading out on another FAO trip, just with a little extra luggage. But this time instead of saying, “I could live here” it will be, “should we live here?”

I’m tired. Camille woke me up at 5:30 and then I couldn’t get back to sleep because I had a list of things in my head that needed to happen before we left the house. And I’m probably cumulatively tired from the past week. Or month. Or year.

We’re starting our descent now. I don’t mind this part so much unless they take forever circling around. Then I start thinking about that Die Hard movie where Bruce Willis’ wife is on a plane and the bad guy threatens to make them circle until the plane runs out of fuel. Hopefully we won’t have any of those issues today. . .