Having just returned from a trip to Texas to visit with Dan's side of the family, travel with a toddler is on my mind, in a post-traumatic stress kind of way. Don't get me wrong, Kate was pretty good for the most part. But there's really just no way to take a kid her age on a plane and not have a few moments that make you want to get out on the wing. This trip I had Dan with me, but in a month I'll be traveling alone with Kate, and so in an attempt to help myself not suffer the amnesia that clearly sets in between plane trips with her, I'm blogging Awesome/Not Awesome, the Toddler Travel Edition. This will be a list of the good and bad things about traveling with Kate, so that I can maybe not be so shocked by the bad and can remember the good makes this worth doing. So here we go:

Awesome: When you wake Kate up at the crack of dawn to get on a plane, she is actually sort of excited, because she seems to sense that we're going to do something special. She chatters all the way to the airport. It is unbearably cute.

Not Awesome: When you wake Kate up at the crack of dawn to get on a plane, by the time it's 3:30 in the afternoon and you're on your last flight of the day, she is so epicly cranky that you think you might just get sanctioned by the FAA for bringing her on a plane.

Fun: Airports generally offer lots to look at and plenty of new people for Kate to flirt with. The first couple of airport hours are like Disney World for her.

Not As Fun: On the other hand, when your airline suddenly announces a gate change after you've schlepped your kid, your stroller, and all your worldly belongings across DFW, the airport starts to feel like the Amazing Race, and not in a good way, because you're definitely losing. Kate will choose that exact moment to develop a strong objection to riding in her stroller, and therefore you will march 20 gates down the terminal at a pace best described as Sleepy Turtle. Kate will be thrilled. She will wave to people. You will spend the whole time apologizing to the air travelers of the world who have to walk around Her Highness.

Great: The i-Pod is the greatest invention in modern history because you can put videos on it. Kate has figured out how to hold the little ear bud up to her ear so she can hear the music while she watches "Annie." This makes you look like a terrible mother, but it is really useful at times.

Not great: Since Kate has your i-Pod and is sitting on your lap, your entertainment options for yourself will be to stare out the window or read the American Way magazine article on Billy Joel for the sixth time. You will hate Billy Joel's stupid face before the flight is over.

Yayy!: Kate gets confused by the time zone and sleeps until a decent hour in the morning during the first part of the trip.

Ugh!: Kate gets confused by the time zone on the way back, too, and wakes up a full hour EARLIER than usual for days on end. Rarin' to go. At 6:15. Cue up Sesame Street!

Happy: Coming home again.

Sad: Coming home again. We miss these people we fly such a long way to see. This trip it was especially fun to see Kate, Chi and Jeremiah have fun together. Here are a few pictures of that, mostly courtesy of my mother in law Lorrae, since in every picture I took of the kids, at least one of them is a blur of motion and pure speed.

Grammy and Grandpa treated the kids to Chuck E. Cheese on Friday. Kate and Jeremiah rode this Barney tractor ride approximately 50 times.

Kate does not understand the actual point of skeeball, but she thinks it is really neat.

Thanks for the fun times, Wachdorf family!

Dear Kate,

This month, you fell in love with "Annie." I have been waiting for this day to come, and the fact that it has proves that you are my daughter, in case anyone had any doubts. I actually bought you a copy of "Annie" on DVD several months ago on a whim, but you had no interest in it, and so it's been sitting on the shelf, gathering dust. Then last week when we were packing to go to San Antonio, you were making me crazy by trying to "help," which means "take things out of the suitcase as fast as I can put them in." It occurred to me that if I could just get you to sit still somewhere for 20 minutes, it might fix everything, so just to see if it would work, I popped "Annie" into the DVD player, and you sat there in frozen wonder for a half hour, watching the singing and the dancing. When I turned it off to feed you dinner, you looked at me with your big brown eyes and said "Ahhhhnnniee!" And for the next 24 hours it was "Ahhnie!" every ten minutes.

Kate, when I was a kid, I watched "Annie" on VHS tape about 1.5 million times. I knew all the words to every song, and I proved it one time when my parents and my Aunt Merry Lynn took me to see a Hattiesburg Civic Light Opera production of "Annie," where I stood up in the balcony and sang along with the actors. They tell this story like it's cute, and all I can think is that they really should have made me shut up for the sake of the other theater-goers. Still, it was the highlight of my life up til then, and I wore the souvenir T-shirt I got that night until it pretty much fell apart. I think I still have it somewhere.

I used to wonder what in the world would induce my parents to attend a live performance of a musical they had been forced to listen to until they undoubtedly heard "Tomorrow" in their sleep. Now I realize that one of the unexpected joys of parenting is how much fun it is to watch your child have fun. It's why it is actually kind of awesome to do things like take you to Chuck E. Cheese, which I'd have paid good money not to do before you were born. And it's like that with Annie. I wouldn't be heartbroken if you didn't love it, but the fact that you do has let me enjoy it again, too. I think taking you to a live performance is starting to climb pretty rapidly up my list of things I'd really like to do one day, and if you stood up and sang all the songs I'd probably let you get away with it, too. That's how warped my brain is now.

This month, if you had your own Facebook account, as some of my family and friends have suggested you should, the things you would "become a fan of" would include: Annie, of course; ice, something you have become obsessed with eating; the garbage truck, which we are anxiously listening for right this minute so that we can run to window and watch it pick up the garbage cans; and dogs. Yes, dogs. No, we don't have a dog. But your grandparents do, and when we visited them this month, you basically relegated your human relations to second string and followed Maggie and Kemah the dogs around like they were celebrities and you were the paparazzi. You referred to them not by their names, but as "Doggy" and "More Doggy." We'd come back to the house after a brief absence and you'd start saying "Hi, Doggy! Hi, More Doggy!" as soon as we pulled into the garage.

I have to tell you, Kate, you're not doing me any favors here. Your daddy and I have a mixed-faith marriage when it comes to animals. He grew up with well-trained pure-bred Labs who lived in the house and were part of the family. Half of the Wachdorf family stories involve the dogs they've owned over the years. If you didn't know any better, you'd think they have a third daughter named Maggie. I, in sharp contrast, grew up in an outside dog home. We had two dogs and a series of cats over the years, but they all primarily lived outside. The last dog we owned was Avalanche, the world's dumbest but sweetest American Bulldog, who lived a happy life on 40 wooded acres, but was not big on baths and smelled like a garbage dump. Av made a game out of trying to sneak into the house, but was always evicted within minutes, with one notable exception. One time when your Gam and Geez were visiting Dan and I in New Mexico, they left Avalanche in the care of your uncle Ryan, whose entire job in dog-sitting was to feed Av and prevent him from getting into the house. Two days into Mom and Dad's trip, they got a call from Ryan, who, after some nice small talk asked in a casual sort of way "So .... how do you think you would get dog slobber out of a couch cushion?"

So I don't want a dog. I especially don't want a dog to live in my house. So far I have been winning this little standoff in our marriage because the score is Dan:Yes to Haley: Heck No, and I'm the one who will be cleaning up after the dog if we had one, so I get like one and a half votes. But now I'm outnumbered, and I should probably just start enjoying the golden years of my life without dog hair and flea treatments and late night trips to the vet. Your daddy's evil plan is working.

You got a lot taller this month. Little dresses that were kind of long on you at the start of the summer are now up above your knees. Meanwhile, you think you're getting bigger than you actually are. One day recently, you walked up and said "Hi, Haley," to me, like it was no big deal, just something you're trying out. This weekend you like the sound of "Hi, Dan." We're having a hard time not laughing when we inform you that you're going to be calling us Mama and Daddy for the foreseeable future. In just a couple of months you're going to be two, an age that sounds impossibly big to me. I have a two year old. And I like to watch Annie and go to Chuck E Cheese, and I'll probably have a dog one day. How remarkable, what one little person can do.

I love you,
Mama

This last picture of Kate was taken at Chuck E. Cheese, where she surprised me to death by actually dancing with the life-sized rat. I was terrified of that thing when I was a kid, and it's almost creepier now, because instead of a person in a suit, they have this giant robot version that just moves around on its own. I still think I was right to be freaked out.

One true fact absent from my recent letter to Kate is that a few weeks ago, I went out and bought a little potty chair for Kate to use. It was met with a lot of interest from her -- much ooohing and aaahing and flipping up and down of the lid -- but not much real grasp of what you're supposed to do with it exactly. This in spite of my best efforts to explain AND an Elmo's Potty Time DVD thoughtfully sent by Gam. (That's right. Elmo's Potty Time is now part of my film collection. We have excellent taste around here.) There have been some moments when I thought she was starting to get it, but overall, I think we might wait until we're done with some traveling we're going to be doing in the next month and then try again. No big deal.

As if to confirm my suspicions, a couple of evenings ago when I was making my nightly run around the house to pick up after the day's devastation, I came upon this in the potty. Yeah. I don't think she gets it.

I have really come to appreciate Albuquerque as a city a lot more in the last six months than I did in the previous six years of living here. Now that I'm home with Kate and we get out and do things, I actually have time to go and find out what there is to do here, and while the kinds of things I'm seeking out now aren't things I would have wanted to do before Kate was born, there really are a lot of public places that are very kid-friendly. This gets a city big points with me now. One of our favorites is the sprayground at the Manzano Mesa Recreational Center. I think these things are pretty common now, but I had never been to one in my life before I took Kate for the first time last summer, and it is so neat! It's basically a giant sprinkler system for the kids to run around in. So last Wednesday we met some friends and spent some time getting wet. Kate and I got there a bit early, and I was able to get some pictures before it got really crowded, which it does. That's understandable because it is HOT, people, and unless you can get wet, it's hard to want to go outside.

A lot of the sprinklers have fun shapes, one of which is a giant daisy. I kept trying to get a picture of it, but the sun was in the wrong spot and I was getting too much glare. Then I realized you could see its shadow on the concrete, and that shows you what it looks like.

Kate was alternately in love with and terrified of the sprays of water. She'd want to get closer, but then when it would hit her in the face she'd back waaaaaaay up and think about it for five minutes or so before she went back. So like her cautious mama.

My mistake this year was that we didn't go until pretty recently, and it closes down in August. But our pass is good through next year, so we'll be sure to take advantage more next summer. I am pretty sure my tax dollars frequently pay for things I either don't like or don't care about, so it's nice to have something like this for public use in the city. Kate is pleased to see her money spent wisely.

Since Kate's birth almost two years ago, there have been a series of moments that have caused me to get a sudden clear glimpse of who I am now versus who I was before I had a child. The comparison is sometimes better for the new me, sometimes much, much worse. For example, I'm pretty sure that at no time in my pre-child life did I have the "If the food on your shirt isn't visible, it's OK to wear it again" rule. Score one for the old me.

One of those moments happened last Friday. A big one. It was the first time that Dan and I left town without Kate. Several months ago, we left Kate with her Grammy so we could have a quick night out of the house, but we were all of three miles up the road, so that was more like a warmup exercise. This was the real deal. Dan goes to a conference in Las Vegas every year for work, and while it isn't the romantic getaway destination we'd pick, it is just a short flight from Albuquerque, and since he was there for work, it meant we really only had to pay for my part of the trip. So in May, Dan's mom booked a ticket to Albuquerque, I booked a ticket to Las Vegas, and I then promptly stopped thinking about the whole thing, and not in a forgetful way, either. More in an "If I don't think about this too hard, maybe I won't freak out" kind of way. I believe it is called denial. I am a big fan.

We've been pretty busy this summer, and before I knew it, it was the third week in July and time to start planning out the logistics of my mother-in-law's time in Albuquerque with Kate. If I do say so myself, we did a pretty good job of it. Dan had the brilliant idea of having her bring my father-in-law's GPS unit so that we could program in various places she might want to go with Kate and have clear directions, especially on how to get home again. I wrote a seven-page document on the various aspects of Kate's schedule, what she eats, says, can and can't do. We got a power of attorney document notarized in case Kate needed medical care in our absence. And all of these preparations happened with relative calm on my part. Then it was Friday.

Dan's mom got into town on Wednesday, and although Kate was having a great time playing with her, she seemed to be sort of picking up on the fact that something was going on. She was getting really clingy to me, and it just ratcheted up my feelings of guilt. Then, in typical small child fashion, Kate had a minor little health hiccup happen. I'm not going to get into what it was. It's one of those things you can't even believe you'll ever have to know about another person until you have a child and suddenly find yourself freely discussing every bodily function there is with your child's pediatrician with the kind of detail usually reserved for scientific research. Suffice it to say it happens sometimes and while it isn't serious, it makes Kate uncomfortable and I hate it. So of course -- OF COURSE -- it started to be apparent late Thursday that it was going to be a problem. By Friday morning, Kate was really not feeling great, and every single fear I'd been trying to avoid about leaving her was in full swing. She would have to go to the doctor. They would want to do some invasive procedure I couldn't even imagine at the moment. I'd have to hear about it all via cell phone and the stress of it would kill me on the spot. And most of all, Kate would have to go through it all without me, because her mother was so selfish as to leave her and go to Las Vegas, of all the trampy places in the world. Clearly I was being very rational at this point.

Long story short, Kate's ailment resolved itself pretty quickly, as it always does. We got on our plane, boarding without 46 pounds of child-related equipment for the first time in two years. I actually just had a book and a purse. And I read the book, too. It was amazing. We talked to Kate a couple of times every day during our trip, and while I had worried that she would be upset by the sound of our voices, she talked to us happily for a few minutes each time before signing off with "Bye bye Mommy! Bye bye Daddy!" I think her absolute glee at how her time alone with Grammy was spent is perfectly summed up in this picture my mother-in-law took of her on the train at the Rio Grande Zoo:

So much for her heartbreak and abandonment issues.

As for us, we had a great time. We slept in mornings and ate meals together during which we stayed seated the entire time and finished our sentences. It's amazing how much talking you can get done when there is not a toddler in the room. We walked up and down the Strip, looking at the spectacle that is Las Vegas. I went to the pool in the afternoon and alternately read my book and just plain stared at the parade of eccentric humanity that gathers at the pool at Caesar's Palace. Which reminds me that I kept a running list of things we witnessed in Vegas that I knew I would have to blog about. It's been several years since I've been to Las Vegas, and what I had forgotten in the intervening years is how prime the people watching is there. Apparently, people leave behind both their inhibitions and their better judgment when they fly to Nevada. If there had been any subtle way to whip out a camera and document some of the horrendous fashion decisions I saw happening in the casinos, I would totally have done it. Some of these people probably would have proudly posed for the photos, too, based on the degree of strut with which they were perpetrating these atrocities. But the written word will have to do. So without further ado:

The Award for Best Costume goes to the 70-year-old woman who was parading through the poker room of Paris Casino in a dress that I promise you could easily have passed for an Olympic figure skating costume. Sequins, Spandex, and Short Skirt appeared to be her fashion motto. It was stunning. .

Top honors for Least Class Ever are tied between a young lady we rode the elevator with one morning and a middle aged woman I saw at the pool later that same day. The young lady in the elevator at 9 a.m., who was not a small person, was wearing a white skirt so short it could easily have come out of the closet of a third grader. Dan and I both found ourselves leaning away from her out of fear that if she moved too quickly in that small environment, we were going to find out exactly what was -- or, worse, wasn't -- under that skirt. But it's hard to make a call between her and the lady at the pool, who was wearing leapord print lingerie in lieu of a swimsuit. That's all I'm going to say about that. Wowee.

And the coveted title of Drunkest Drunkety Drunk Drunks, a tough title to win in Vegas, where everyone is walking around with a giant adult beverage in their hand at all times, goes to a couple of moviegoers we encountered when we went to see Harry Potter at the Palms Casino. Halfway into the movie, two people came staggering into the theater and sat down in the row in front of us. I actually smelled them before I saw them, that's how strongly they smelled of alcohol. We didn't have much time to contemplate that though, because almost immediately upon sitting down, they began having the following conversation in Drunk Stage Whisper, which is equivalent to Hoarse Screaming in the sober world. I will reproduce it with the cursing bleeped out.

Guy: Wait. Is this (bleeping) Harry Potter? The ones with the books?
Girl: No No it's not Harry Potter because that kid has glasses ... (a closeup of Harry Potter comes on the screen, glasses and all..) Oh, (bleep).
Girl (turns to moviegoers to our left) Heeeyy! Heeeyy! Is this Harry Potter?

Upon being informed that yes indeed, this was Harry Potter, these two got up to leave. The woman bleeped her way down the stairs near the exit before realizing that the guy had taken a wrong turn and headed up the stairs to the back of the theater instead. She had to go and get him. My only complaint is that laughing that hard somewhat detracted from the drama of the epic struggle to vanquish He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Otherwise it was quite entertaining.

Dan is coming home from his business trip today, and Kate and I are happy. It will be nice to be all together as a family again. I'm glad we went, although if I had known how hard it was going to be to actually leave the house and get on the plane, I might have hesitated more. But once we left, it was good for us to go spend a few days alone and remember a little bit about what we are like without kids. I highly recommend it. Next time maybe we'll go somewhere a bit less tacky. In the meantime, if you go to Vegas, please take pictures of what you see for me. Because no matter how much they claim that "What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas," the truth is that it makes for some really fun blogging.