last day in atlanta

i woke up and got packed and ready and we were actually out the door by 11!  once again experiencing almost no travel/packing anxiety!  i truly never expected to see progress in this area of my life but for some [very unexpected and unknown] reason, it's been happening... even if it's temporary, i'll take it!  it's AMAZING!

brady saw this picture of my dad and kept saying "chase!  i want chase!"  ha.  chase is my cousin's kid... family genes run strong.

we went shopping for toilets at lowes.  my biggest regret of the trip is that mom and i didn't have more time to run errands like this or tackle any organizing projects.  i blame brady and that i had to take a 2-3 hour nap with him every afternoon instead of having that alone time with my mom.  maybe next time?

brady was sooo tired all the time (i think waking up during the night and cosleeping with me the rest of the night left him as unrested and tired as i felt.  he fell asleep as soon as we left lowes and was still out cold when we arrived at fat matt's to meet dad for lunch.

so even though people are getting arrested for this sort of stuff these days... we chanced it and left him in the car.  see that rolled down window above abigail's head?  that's brady semi photobombing the picture.  lunch was superb and abigail was well behaved and brady slept through the entire thing.

still out when we got back to the car after lunch.  don't worry... we checked on him VERY frequently while we were eating and were within earshot of him as well.

not sure how we lucked out with such pleasant weather in the middle of july but it was amazing!  so so pleasant!

we went to the atlanta botanical gardens for a few hours and it was wonderful.  all of my pictures from that are on my big camera and will have to be posted later.  like every other time, abigail wanted to be pushed in the stroller and brady wanted to be held.  we had our arms full.

we stopped in the cell phone lot to feed both kids (mostly brady) before the flight.  lots of mandarin oranges.  i had to wake brady up to eat and initially he was so upset that he wouldn't, but when he did... man, the kid downed so much food!  a full belly = a happy brady.  also, i rigged abigail's beach bag (from her wonderful aunt bekah) so she could carry her own snacks and entertainment and it worked pretty well.  abigail and brady were both really well behaved during the whole travel experience.  in the airport, on the plane, and in the denver airport.   

abigail shared a brief but precious friendship with this girl when she complimented abigail's shirt and sandals.  they sat next to each other on the train and talked about their trips.  this girl was several years older and probably four times abigail's size but neither of them cared.  i love kids' lack of prejudice in that regard.  i was sad they couldn't visit more at baggage claim.  as i said, it was a very brief friendship.

brady and i were feeling pretty amazing about how well our travel experience was going.  and he totally rocked it on the airplane and both kids got tons of compliments on their excellent behavior.  the last 30 minutes of the flight the kids were having trouble breathing from laughing so hard and i kept thinking "what? we're almost landing?! i could do another two hours if i needed to!"  that doesn't frequently happen.  ; )

i got one of our bags and they instantly sat down to rest their wearied traveled feet.

and they thought these things were the funnest things ever.

so that entertained them until christopher arrived... which took him a while due to airport traffic and once again i was thinking... we could do this for another hour if we needed to!  but luckily we didn't and that was great too.

it was a really great day.