He's a traveling (little) man...

Before I was 17, I had never stepped foot out of the U.S. - and only briefly visited Oklahoma, California and D.C. in addition to my home state of Texas.

The travel bug hit me much later in life. I didn't have a passport until I was 22 or 23.

By the time Julian was a week old, he had already been to three states. By a month old, he was up to five. His passport came in the mail about a week ago, and he already has his own frequent flier number.

We're traveling to Switzerland a week from Friday for nine days, with a little drive into Austria, Lichtenstein and possibly even Germany and France. We've only made hotel reservations for the first three days - and secured the rental car. The rest is going to be of the "fly by the seat of our pants" type of travel. We've taken him into Canada but this will be our first big international trip with him (not counting our trip to Northern Ireland/Ireland when I was about 5 months pregnant with him).

For those of you that know us - this should be no surprise. We ended up yesterday on a 12 hour road trip because I didn't want to clean the house. The trip to Zurich? Meh - flight sale on American that was too good to pass up.

He's flown maybe 10 times or so - so I'm pretty experienced at the fervent "please no diaper blowouts while we're on the plane" prayers. We've never been on a flight this long with him, though - and never to a place where we didn't speak the language.

We tend to travel light - especially for our international trips - but with him in tow that may not be as possible.

Any tips for travel with an infant? Anyone with suggestions about where to go on the trip? Any advice would be greatly appreciated as with each day my stress level rises higher with regard to the trip. We bought a lightweight collapsible McClaren umbrella stroller for the trip - as our huge Mutsy wasn't going to be flight compatible. Trying to figure out how to transport him around (he's topping out at over 25 lbs. now) when we're not carting him in the stroller, how to keep him entertained on the flight, how to get him to easily adjust (ha!) to the time change, etc.

Just today, for instance I managed to secure an appointment to fix my passport to finally show my married name. Only my appointment was just an appointment to get in line behind 100+ other people who were also traveling within the next two weeks. No blackberry or cell use allowed. I had to reschedule as there was no way I could miss a day's worth of work for it.

So what say you? What has/hasn't worked for long flights and travel for your family or for your friends?

Well that was rather rude of me...

I forget that all of you don't follow me on Facebook and Twitter - so when I'm lax about updating here some of you were thoughtfully wondering about our amnio results. So sorry. Thank you for those of you who wished us well.

Everything on the scan came back fine, and our son is genetically "perfect." Measuring a week ahead still (ahem. RIGHT ON TIME according to my dates, but whatever). We're struggling coming up with a name for him - but thankfully we still have some time.

This pregnancy has been much, much easier thus far on me than Julian was - aside from the annoying swelling and sciatic pain that I've never had before. Most of the time, I honestly forget that I'm pregnant at all until I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror or a stranger asks when I'm due.

Julian has started patting my belly, and we tell him that there's a baby brother inside there that is coming to live with us. I know he has no concept of what that means, and if his behavior when I was holding his six month old cousin is any indication - we're screwed. While I was holding Lincoln, Julian was livid and was trying as hard as he could to push Lincoln out of my lap and on to the couch. He was fine playing with Lincoln by himself, but when I picked him up - all hell broke loose. Granted, he'll likely be just shy of 15 months when this one gets here - so there's not much that we can do right now to really tell him about the baby. He doesn't understand it - and couldn't possibly given his age.

On the way back from Texas we apparently picked up some superbug and we've all been horribly, horribly sick since then. First Julian came down with it, then Patrick. Then my mom (who is Julian's daytime caretaker) got sicker than I've ever seen her in my life - with uncontrollably shaking and fever. Now it's my turn. I've been battling it since last Friday, and have missed work since then aside from two brief cameo appearances in the mornings this week.