{"id":3629,"date":"2011-12-26T23:44:18","date_gmt":"2011-12-27T09:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/?p=3629"},"modified":"2011-12-29T23:16:39","modified_gmt":"2011-12-30T09:16:39","slug":"ohio-trip-days-0-5-and-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/?p=3629","title":{"rendered":"Ohio in July &#8211; Days 0.5 and 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not Christmas in July, it&#8217;s July at Christmas! I (Andy) am finally starting on the photos from Leilani&#8217;s and my trip to Ohio way back in July (I promised Sonja I would write these posts, lets not say when). When we upload the more recent Christmas photos, we&#8217;ll probably move these posts around.<\/p>\n<p>With Kaua&#8217;i being a major tourist destination, we&#8217;re quite fortunate to have lots of flights to the mainland. Sometimes, you can get just the right flight, and if you&#8217;re lucky, it won&#8217;t be too expensive. We left Kaua&#8217;i on Friday afternoon on a direct flight to SFO, where we changed planes at 11pm and got the red-eye to Chicago. Leilani got the Nintendo out even before going through security and was then too excited to sleep on the first flight (that&#8217;ll teach the parents to make it a special airplane-only game):<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110708-oh-nintendo.jpg' alt=\"110708-oh-nintendo\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><\/p>\n<p>And in SFO, we got lucky and had neighboring gates, with a kid-play area in between them! Leilani was still a bit wound up and played the whole time. The play area had a weather theme, and she really liked the mini-whirlwind simulator (&#8220;Flower&#8211;that&#8217;s her toy cat, I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re on Kaua&#8217;i anymore&#8221;&#8211;and Daddy just hopes we&#8217;re not going to Oz):<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110708-oh-whirlwind.jpg' alt=\"110708-oh-whirlwind\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><\/p>\n<p>We did go for a walk up and down the terminal, where we found a cool only-in-SF kind of game: a huge touch-screen pinball game (see <a target=\"_new\" href=\"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/?p=3423\">Sonja&#8217;s video<\/a> to see it in action):<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110708-oh-pinball.jpg' alt=\"110708-oh-pinball\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Leilani finally slept on the second flight, and of course, then I had to carry her half-asleep through Chicago O&#8217;Hare. And the walk between SF arrivals and Akron-Canton departures is at least a mile&#8211;every time I do this, I swear the tickets aren&#8217;t as good as I thought, and vow never to do it again&#8230; Chicago sunrise and Ohio fields:<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-redeye.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-redeye\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><br \/>\n<img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-ohio.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-ohio\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><\/p>\n<p>But, for once, the flights were on-time, and we arrived at Great-grandma&#8217;s house early for the family reunion nearby. We got to see Andy&#8217;s cousin Ryan before he took off for a summer internship in New York:<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-ryan.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-ryan\" height=\"600\" width=\"450\"\/><\/p>\n<p>The Kass family reunion is mostly from Jim&#8217;s half-cousins and their families (his grandfather remarried and had more children after his grandmother&#8217;s early death). Leilani is the only descendant on our side of the family. But two of her (half-3rd) cousins, Matt and Trevor, were there with their mother Pam, and we know them from when they lived in the Bay Area. I&#8217;m not going to post lots of photos of people that I barely know and Leilani won&#8217;t recognize, but here are Grandpa Jim and Grandma Rosemary:<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-kr-jimrosemary.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-kr-jimrosemary\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><\/p>\n<p>In any case, our hosts have a beautiful house in a beautiful wooded area inside the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. This is typical summer time in Ohio: green grassy hills, forest, and daylight until 10pm&#8211;and swings:<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-kr-tireswing.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-kr-tireswing\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><br \/>\n<img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-kr-swingchair.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-kr-swingchair\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><\/p>\n<p>And slip-n-slide. At first, Leilani wasn&#8217;t as good as the boys, but she tried over and over, and got much better. Then the uncles set up the double length, and she eventually mastered that too:<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-kr-slipnslide.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-kr-slipnslide\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><br \/>\n<img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-kr-slipnslide2.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-kr-slipnslide2\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><br \/>\n<img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-kr-slipnslide3.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-kr-slipnslide3\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Leilani lasted longer than I expected, especially after all the running uphill to do the sliding. She played some more with her cousins, ate some food, and then passed out in my lap. After a while, I put her on the couch inside:<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-kr-sleeping.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-kr-sleeping\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><br \/>\n<img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-kr-sleeping2.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-kr-sleeping2\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><\/p>\n<p>When it was time for the family portrait, she was sleeping so deeply I couldn&#8217;t wake her up. So I just carried her out for the picture, then put her back to sleep:<\/p>\n<p><img src='http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/images2\/6\/3\/web\/110709-oh-kr-grouppic.jpg' alt=\"110709-oh-kr-grouppic\" height=\"450\" width=\"600\"\/><\/p>\n<p>She slept for 4 or 5 hours, waking up only on the drive home late at night. But she still slept all night and most of the next morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not Christmas in July, it&#8217;s July at Christmas! I (Andy) am finally starting on the photos from Leilani&#8217;s and my trip to Ohio way back in July (I promised Sonja I would write these posts, lets not say when)&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3629"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3635,"href":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3629\/revisions\/3635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/simplify-your-life.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}