What a ride!

After travelling across the globe on a tiring 18-hour long haul flight, we landed in San Francisco and settled into our new home at Stanford University.

Flying was quite an adventure. We took two flights - a seven hour one to Seoul (an hour in transit) followed by an 11-hour journey to San Francisco. It all started out very well. Kieran took to flying like a pro. He was really excited at the prospect of sitting in an airplane and was happy to take the window seat, where he spent a lot of the time peering out of the window pointing at the clouds. He didn't like the ear phones but that didn't stop him from enjoying his TV or merrily tugging at the wire that was connected to the inflight entertainment remote control. At one stage, our little tyke decided to plonk himself by the window, while his parents earned a stern warning from the SQ stewardess that we should not let the child sit on the arm of the chair. Oh well.

Kieran loved his meals and actually sat for a long time enjoying his chicken nuggets and cake. He also discovered the joy of shredding the napkins and watching the little bits float to the floor. You can imagine how messy it all got. However, he wasn't so easily persuaded to go to bed and as he got more tired, he became crankier. On both flights he wailed loudly for more than half an hour, and as his cries got louder, our blood pressure also shot up. Hubby D finally managed to carry and rock him to sleep on the flight to Seoul but it wasn't so easy the second time round when Kieran demanded to leave the airplane (where could we go?) and ended up walking down the aisle, clutching his bolster with tears rolling down his eyes. We whipped out the ultimate weapon -- a portable DVD player that was a present from his grandparents -- but alas THERE WAS NO BATTERY! Thank god Hubby D had the good sense to play the DVD on his Mac and the little one was finally persuaded to lie down and drink his milk while watching the music videos.

When we finally touched down, it took ages to clear immigration. We got to the front of the queue when Kieran insisted he had to pee and he wouldn't do it in his diaper, he had to go to the loo! He demonstrated his urgency by trying to remove his trousers so we had no choice but to drag him off to the toilet. Thank goodness a nice customs officer said we could just wait for the next turn once Kieran was done, and didn't make us queue all over again!

And if all that wasn't tiring enough, we got into a taxi and it took us a while to finally locate our house. By then, the driver had lost patience with us (despite earning a handsome sum of USD 120) as it was past the end of his shift, and he just wanted to dump us as soon as possible. He didn't know the directions to our house and neither did we naturally! Sheesh.

So you can imagine at the end of day one, the whole family was tired and grouchy. And we all promptly went to bed although we were woken up by an energetic Kieran at 1 am (jet lag) and we only managed to get him to bed three hours later. The next time I woke, it was 1230 pm!