This past Saturday we began our annual family vacation. Destination: the Rocky Mountains of Colorado! I couldn’t have been more excited to get away from it all…it’s been an exhausting year of work and I’ve been looking forward to spending time together with Lizzie with no distractions. But first…we had to get there, with toddler in tow!

We booked a direct flight from Orlando to Denver, so that meant a 3.5 hour interval of entertaining Lizzie before we reached our destination. Entertaining in a cramped row of three seats, I might add. JR and I boarded first so we were able to save a seat for my mom in our row and another seat for my dad in the row next to us….ya gotta have reinforcements!

3.5 hours in a confined space together means you have to get creative…and I brought a big bag of tricks to help. Our best trick….food! Lizzie loves to eat so anytime there was a lull in our high altitude sideshow of reading, doodling, and playing with stickers, we brought out a new yummy snack.

For some reason I thought the plane would bring out Lizzie’s shy side, but instead of sitting in Mommy’s lap demurely….

Another thing we learned on the flight – toddlers like to stretch out their legs as much as we do. The only problem is stretching out their legs directly conflicts with the passenger seat in front of them (read: annoying child kicking the back of your seat). Luckily, the guy in front of us didn’t complain and we were able to move our little munchkin across all our laps so she could stretch those legs without offending anyone on the plane.

Two hours in to our flight that magic moment finally occurred – sleep! For almost an hour, Lizzie snoozed on our laps. Hallelujah!

She woke up with just enough time to watch us land at the Denver airport. We made it! Well at least we had made it to Denver… We still had to pick up our rental car and drive out to Estes Park.

Around 5:30 pm mountain time, we pulled into the driveway of our new home for the week in Estes.