Fortunately

Fortunately, as I mentioned in my previous post, we have some great friends and family.  Unfortunately, some of them live far away.  Fortunately, there have been some adventurous people in this world, and so the airplane has come into being.  Unfortunately, air travel with an infant or a toddler is not exactly a picnic.

Alasdair and I have been on 4 plane trips.  We flew to Ottawa to visit Denise, and then took the train on to Montreal to visit Kaleigh, Curtis, Benjamin and Ferris.  We flew to Charlottetown with Nana and Uncle Greg in the summer.  Grammie, Grandpa and Uncle Mike drove over from Cape Breton to visit us while we were there.  We also got to dip our feet in the ocean and play on a red sand beach and of course visit Anne of Green Gables.  We flew again to Ottawa this past December to visit Denise again (and also Sheila, Susanna and Brian).  And then we flew to Edmonton a few weeks ago to visit Kaleigh and Benjamin in their new digs.

Fortunately, Alasdair has been pretty good on the plane.  He eats a bit, sleeps a bit and enjoys listening to stories.  Unfortunately, mommy doesn't always have the best sense when it comes to appropriate reading material.  On our most recent trip to Ottawa, I brought along one of our favourite books ... "Fortunately" (ahhh, this hopefully excuses the format of this post).  It is about a fellow named Ned who (fortunately) is invited to a birthday party, but (unfortunately) the party is in Florida and he is in New York.  Picture Alasdair and I seated in our window seat, quietly reading this book, with (I would guess) all the passengers around us listening in, but pretending not to.  The book starts out as I mentioned with the birthday invite, and a friend (fortunately) loans Ned an airplane to travel down south, and I guess, although it is not mentioned, Ned is a pilot.  Everything is going along swimmingly until I reach page 4 or so ... 'Unfortunately, the motor exploded'.  For some reason, even though I have read the book a hundred times, I didn't see that one coming.  I (always calm and cool in a crisis) realized quickly that I had better just keep my mouth shut and turn the page.  Fortunately, Alasdair didn't seem to mind, and I decided not to look around to see what anyone else thought (on that reading or the subsequent 10 or 12 times that Alasdair had me read the book during that flight).