After we claimed our mostly unharmed baggage we made our way through the airport to the attached airport hotel.

It’s our turn to check in and the clerk flips through our paper work and after fumbling around a bit he informs my mom that we don’t have enough vouchers. My mom explains that the airline clerk said “it would be fine”, but he assured us that it was not in fact fine. Since we’re already exhausted and just want a place to put our bags, have lunch and relax, we thought maybe he could just call down to the airline desk (the hotel is attached to the airport after all) and clear up this misunderstanding.

Nope. Why not? Because  he’d have to call the airline phone number that you and I call and wait on hold with everyone else. REALLY?! This seems like an easy problem to solve. Just give the hotel front desk clerks the extension for the airline hotel reservation desk. YOU’RE WELCOME!

So after my mom goes back and forth to get another voucher so that all seven of us could sleep in the hotel (imagine!) the hotel assigns our rooms. He also hands out meal vouchers. Thankfully the airline had indicated for us to receive vouchers for lunch, dinner and breakfast since it was still before noon when we landed in Toronto. And what do those vouchers add up to?

Wait for it…

$32 each. (Except Harrison. He had to pay for a ticket, but he doesn’t get a voucher).

Let me break it down for you. That’s $7 for breakfast, $10 for lunch and $15 for dinner. And of course they’re only valid for the hotel restaurant. Which makes sense actually since where else are you going to go? You’re stranded.

Seems reasonable enough, until you remember that Toronto is one of the most expensive cities in North America and you glance over at the menu. You’re $7 breakfast voucher doesn’t get you very far when a cup of tea costs $7.50.

After another long wait at the hotel desk we finally had our rooms assigned (correctly) and our meal vouchers distributed. So we headed up to our rooms and put our baggage down, and Rolly and I got Harrison settled and fed.

By this time its almost 2 o’clock and we’re all starving. We have a snack and a couple rounds of much-needed, well-earned, beer. And the tab for our drinks and appetizers comes to $187! Yeah… that’s how expensive this place was. After paying the bill the waitress tells us that we can’t use our vouchers for alcohol. Okay, that’s not too surprising. That’s a pretty common policy. (Why it matters to the airline or the hotel how we use our vouchers is beyond me, but that’s the rule). So we sort out our vouchers to make a total that makes sense to pay for the food and settle the rest. We had problems with the vouchers later that night again when they weren’t going to accept our “lunch” voucher for our pizza dinner since it wasn’t lunch. Again… why that would matter is beyond me. (Especially since they took some breakfast and dinner ones as lunch payment earlier).

We all called it an early night, hoping for a better tomorrow. Oh, and did I mention that instead of waking up in paradise for husbandman’s birthday, we woke up in an airport hotel because of this delay? Happy birthday?

Morning comes and we’re feeling optimistic. I guess we figured things couldn’t be worse than they were the day before. But more surprises were ahead of us. Not happy surprises of the birthday variety.

We make our way to the little kiosks to print our boarding passes, and in some strange, well-timed stroke of luck, a very helpful airline employee was looking over Roland’s shoulder and noticed that our boarding passes (on the screen) say “Gated”. Neither of us would’ve even noticed.

He says to us, “That’s not good”.

I don’t know why this surprised me, but it did.

Turns out, that GUARANTEED AND PROTECTED doesn’t mean anything at all, and now all seven of us are actually on standby on the only flight that leaves for Puerto Vallarta that day.

At this point I seriously can’t believe this is happening. After a lot of discussion, a taking-it-to-the-next-level-administrator, a check-in agent sending my parents and brother and sister-in-laws bags down the wrong chute with the wrong baggage tags, some problem solving and quite a bit of “I can’t believe this is happening again” on our part, we’re told to print our standby passes, and check our bags and go to the gate and talk to the gate agent when they arrive and hopefully there’ll be room on the flight.

In some kind of birthday miracle that airline employee was looking over our shoulder. If he hadn’t noticed that we were gated, we would’ve gotten our boarding passes, walked to the gate, and prepared to board the plane only to find out that we weren’t on it. And be stranded another day.

And Roland must’ve worked a little more birthday magic because when the gate agent arrived we went up to talk to her and we were all able to get on the flight. Phew! We were on our way to Mexico at last!

As you know, we had a blast once we got there. We celebrated husbandman’s birthday, New Year’s Eve, and Harrison’s 10 month-aversary.

Our unbelievable story of how we got to Mexico really happened and we lived to tell the tale.

We made it home safe and sound and arrived back in Ottawa on a snowy night slightly behind schedule at about 1:30 am. Tired and ready to hit the road, we sent Roland and my brother in a cab to pick up the cars (of course the hotel shuttle doesn’t run that late) so the rest of us could stay warm and stay put while they dig out the cars and drive over.

I decided to play lookout since the guys wouldn’t be able to leave the cars once they pulled up. After 10 minutes or so I see our car pulling around so I pop my head outside just to make sure they know where to stop, but as I head outdoors I see my brother headed towards me. I was confused. Why did he leave his car running in the pick up area? You’re not allowed to do that!

But it turns out he didn’t leave his car running. The little bow on top of our crazy trip, just to round things out, is that on that dark and cold and stormy night my brother’s car wouldn’t start.

TRUE STORY.

You already saw the photos. It looked like we had a good time. We DID have a good time. But it took quite a bit of inner strength not to yell, kick or scream on our way to Mexico.

When Roland and I have these kind of frustrating situations happen to us, one of us usually looks at the other, more frustrated one, and says “Ohh… we’re going to be on the news!” The implication being that one of us is about to lose our cool and do something crazy like take out our frustration on the poor old lady in line in front of us counting out her pennies, when she realizes that she forgot to give the cashier her coupon and she needs to restart counting.

The headline would read, “Woman with baby accosts elderly woman in check-out line over a few pennies, while husband stands by”.

We might have known that things weren’t going to go smoothly when I logged in to add Harrison to the flight and noticed that my mom had booked my ticket under my maiden name. I’ve only been married for three years. Really, mom? Anyway, we got that sorted out, and got Harrison added to the flight, but all in all that was pretty simple compared to what we had coming.

It’s a story of best laid plans. Since we had an early morning flight from Ottawa (an hours drive from where we were staying over the holidays) we booked ourselves into a hotel near the airport and arrived the night before. The hotel offers shuttle service, and parking. Sounds easy enough.

We arrive at the airport in the morning, and get checked in and through security in Ottawa with only the usual rigamarole. In fact, because we’re travelling with Harry, we get to go through the family security line. A walk in the park.

We have plenty of time at the gate.

We board and get settled in.

Then… we hear that dreaded sound. That static that every airline passenger hates to hear, “This is your Captain speaking”. Quick sidebar: Has any Captain just come on and said “Ladies and Gentlemen this is your Captain speaking. I just wanted to tell you you look lovely today. Thanks for flying!” We hadn’t even pulled back from the gate when our Captain came on the speaker. If I were travelling by myself this sound alone wouldn’t put me off so much, but when you’re travelling with an infant whom you’ve woken up at 5 am, who’s sitting squirming on your lap, AND you’re trying to time his bottle feeding to minimize the impact of pressure changes on his sweet little ears, a fifteen minute delay can seem like an eternity and just cause for a revolt. But we’re assured that we just need to have the ground crew come and check something out because a light has come on.

Why wasn’t this checked before we were loaded, you ask? Good question. We never got the answer.

A fifteen minute delay isn’t going to break us so we just try to keep Harrison from fussing too much over his somewhat overdue bottle, tighten our seat belts and wait. We have an hour and a half layover scheduled between flights so at this point we should have no trouble making our connection.

“Hello Ladies and Gentlemen we just need to (blank). It should only be another 10-15 minutes”.

We heard that message on the ground, not moving, in our seats, for two hours!

As Roland put it, they spent two hours basically saying that they have no idea what they’re doing and they’re just being prompted on what to do next.

That is, “Since we’ve just done X, we now need to do Y and they say it’ll take another 15-20 minutes”. Really, Captain? You didn’t know that? You’re not instilling me with a ton of confidence in your depth of understanding of the operation of this aircraft.

As our delays lag on we asked the flight attendant if there’s any chance they’ll hold our flight for us. She says that it depends on how many people on this flight are making the connection. Sounds promising, there’s 7 of us travelling together, and throughout this delay we’ve met at least 3 other passengers headed to Puerto Vallarta on that flight. 10 people! Surely they’ll hold the plane for us.

When we haven’t even been de-iced by the time our connection was set to depart, I’m not holding out much hope.

We do finally get up and down from Ottawa to Toronto and immediately turn off our airplane mode and check the app to find out if our plane has left.

Wop wop. That flight is long gone.

It’s the only flight leaving for Puerto Vallarta that day. That means we’re stuck in Toronto over night.

We’re directed to a line to make hotel reservations, receive our meal vouchers and get information about our next flight. We’re told on the plane and a few other places that since the delays were the fault of the airline we’d be GUARANTEED AND PROTECTED for the next flight. (This will be important later).

We wait with all the other passengers from our flight who’ve missed their connections. New York, Hong Kong, Puerto Vallarta…

When we finally get to the front of the line we’re given our hotel accommodation cards and our meal vouchers that we need to give to the hotel staff. Just after leaving the line my mom notices that we only have 5 cards not 6 for the 6 adults. She returns to the clerk who assures her that “It’ll be fine”.

Since we’ve been dumped in Toronto, we now need to pick up our luggage which has been circling the carousel for the hour or so that we’ve been waiting in line for the hotel reservations.

Our bags are easy to spot, they’re the only ones left, but they’re not all easy to carry. My dad’s bag has been broken in transit. Into another line we go, to be told that he’ll have to mail away for compensation for the damage to the bag. Did it matter that we still had a week of travel to do? No, you’ll have to travel with the broken bag.

Are you stressed yet? I’m stressed out just writing about it. So I’m going to take a break. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s finale!

It was definitely in need of a trim. I had actually been meaning to trim around his ears for a while now. That seems to be the area that got out of hand first. Seemed simple enough. But being that I wanted his dad to be around for the first snip, and that I wanted to take pictures of the “big event” (for blogging) I kept putting it off. And by the time this weekend rolled around his hair was in need of a professional. I didn’t want to be responsible for giving him the haircut that resulted in embarrassing pictures of him (at least not on account of the haircut I gave him), so off to the salon we went.

You can see from this before picture just how long it was. It was starting to get close to his eyes.

As with everything so far, Harrison took this new experience in stride.

He got to have one arm out from under the cape so that he could wave at least one arm.

Chewing on the hair clip kept him occupied for a little while. Then the stylist had to do some quick cutting and fancy maneuvers.

His verdict?

I guess he’s not quite sure about how it turned out, but I think it looks much better!

Special thanks to my amazing and patient stylist, Kim. And to husbandman the photographer! xo

I mentioned that my parents’ Christmas present to us was to take us to Mexico for a week. So all 7 of us (my parents, my brother and his wife, and the three of us) packed our bags for sunny Puerto Vallarta. We had an amazing time, and words really can’t describe how great the trip was so I put together a little slideshow for ya. Enjoy!

December 2011 was so full of great family memories. There’s so many things to tell you that I thought I’d just write ‘em all out in a “Top Ten” -style list to re-cap your first ten months on the planet.

1. You started cruising around on the furniture.

2. Perhaps more importantly, you learned to get down. For a while you could pull yourself up. You could stand and play for a while once you were standing. But you couldn’t get down. You were just stuck until you’d fall or your dad or I would rescue you. You first learned to get down by doing the side splits, going down, down, down, until your bum was close to the ground and you would just sort of… flop.

3. You learned to wave. You wave at everything. Sometimes you wave with both hands. Your waving is so happy. It’s hard not to smile.

4. You started to clap your hands. I sing to you “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands” and you get excited and wait while waving your arms until I say the “clap your hands” part (ie: your cue) and then you clap. Genius!

5. Grandpa C taught you how to take horsey rides. Then he taught you how to make the horsey go giddy-up. Then you showed him that grandpas never get to rest.

6. Your first visit to Santa.

7. Our first Christmas as a family. 

(Also demonstrating clapping)

8. You got your two front teeth for Christmas. Just days before, I saw one little white nub ready to pop out. The very next day there was a second one right along side it.

9. You started crawling on your hands and knees.

10. First tropical vacation. Now that we’ve visited Mexico, you can cross all the countries in North America off your Been-There list! (And I can too!)

Love,

Mama

This here’s just gone have to stop.

In keeping with tradition we both got each other a new ornament for the tree.

Roland got me a Guess How Much I Love You ornament. It’s sweet because we often say that we love each other to the moon and back.

And I got him this snowflake/chef-inspired ornament that I thought was cute and a propos because he loves to cook.

He’s not the only one who’s handy in the kitchen, though. I got a kitchen calculator from Lee Valley from my aunt. I am beyond excited! Now I should be handier?

We also both got these great Initial Mugs from Indigo. I had them on my wishlist on Pinterest and some special people spied them and snagged one for each of us.

Even though I’m usually the one who takes the lead when it comes to home decor, husbandman likes to participate and is a great voice of reason partner for making this house into our home. After all it’s his home, too. Before the holidays we went to one of our favourite home stores and he spied this fun whale pillow. And I managed to pick it up on sale. A little present for each of us!

And since I have the best husband in the world, he bought me the boots I had my eyes on. (I gave him all the details). Perhaps they don’t make you as giddy as they make me, but I am over the moon!

Husbandman got this iLuv dual-dock alarm clock that was on his Guys Gift Guide this year. With Roland getting up before the roosters every morning for his long commute into the city it’s nice (and necessary) to have this reliable alarm clock. Our old one was, well… not always reliable and the tuner was starting to go and waking up to static instead of the radio has got to be the worst way to start your day. And to add to its desirable features, it also eliminates us having to have multiple chargers on our night stand for our iPhones. Score! It’s soo awesome. I wrapped it up for him, but really it’s for both of us. iLuv it! (See what I did there?)

(Did you catch that little 4:50 in the top right hand corner of the display? Yeah… that’s the time husbandman gets up in the morning.)

Oh and did I mention that my parents paid for our family trip to Mexico? So yeah… there’s that HUGE present. But it didn’t fit under the tree. More on that later.

Lots of great learning toys (some that we haven’t even opened yet, as you can see).

See the whale in the middle of the photo? Love it! It’s the Moby Bath Spout Cover by Skip Hop. It fits over the bath spout so bath time is both fun and safer! How cute – and smart – is that?

The book in the photo (at top) represents the many, many books he received. And the toque represents the many adorable outfits and pjs he got. He and daddy actually got matching toques. I’ll try to snap a picture next time they’re out playing in the snow (if we ever get any).

I’m happy to report the toys haven’t completely over run our play space, but they definitely take up more room than blankies and rattles. How did this happen so quickly?

Do you have any tips on keeping kids toys from taking over your space? 

H: Can you believe that by this summer Harry will be able to pour drinks into a cup? That’s crazy!

R: Good. He can bring me my beer this summer.

Thanks for sticking with me as I get back to a more regular posting schedule. I’m trying to get all our holiday stuff in order/take photos for posts. I don’t want to be talking about Christmas much longer. So I promise, I’ll try to wrap things up soon! (No pun intended… but I liked it.)

Despite the fact that we told friends and family not to buy lots of gifts for him, Harrison was spoiled with many great toys, books, outfits and more.

It was also great to spend time with my mom and dad who were home from England and it was even more amazing to see them playing with and loving on our little peanut.

I’m pretty sure Harrison didn’t really get what was going on, but it is certainly a Christmas husbandman and I will never forget.

Here’s some snaps from the the big day and my family Christmas dinner on Boxing Day.

You saw our picture from our blog Christmas card, here’s another picture that my dad snapped for us.

I went shopping for a gift for my godfather and the owner of the shop told me that my dad had left his blue sweater there (It’s a small town). I was a bit confused because my dad had exchanged a blue sweater that my brother had bought him for his birthday and thought that the shop owner was actually confused. In fact, my dad had gone in to exchange the sweater and left the one that he wore into the store behind. So, I wrapped up his old sweater and put a tag on it.

To: My Forgetful Grandpa
Love: Harrison
You must be really old!

Here he is opening it up on Christmas morning.

He liked it!

Here are my boys… I guess we’re all Macs in this family.

I didn’t get in too many pictures because I’m usually holding the camera, but here I am helping Harrison open a book. Just look at that awesome tearing action! He’s going to be an old pro by next year.

Here’s the giant turkey about to go in the oven.

I’m not sure if this shot really shows how big this turkey was, but trust me, it was big. It had to be. If I counted correctly we had 43 people for dinner … and at least 14 (and one on the way) people missing.

No really.

Opening more presents.

My crafty aunts made some amazing desserts.

Nolan (proudly wearing the hat I got him) and Kelley look ready to dig in!

A few borrowed slow cookers ready to go back to their homes.

And that’s the story of how I gained 5 lbs over the holidays. Actually… it’s only half the story. Did I tell you that we went to an all-inclusive resort in Mexico for a week? That’s a post for another day.