Home, Sweet Home!

(picture from Sunday in India, I'm wearing Indian clothes)

We are back! We arrived home yesterday around 4pm. I felt like a zombie. What an exhausting journey home. If I count from when we left my in laws to go to the airport to when we walked into our house yesterday, it was about 31 hours.

We touched down in Newark, NJ yesterday morning around 5:30am. Our flight from Mumbai(Bombay), India was direct to NJ and took 15.5 hours. Yes, that is long! The exhaustion continues once you land as you immediately go through immigration(easy part), then to luggage claim to get your things to walk through Customs(HUGE pain in the neck waiting for your luggage to all arrive on the belts, like 30-45 mins standing around). The Customs part takes 10 seconds, if they don't ask you to open your belongings(they have never asked us that). Then you drop your big, heavy suitcases back off on another belt to be sent to your connecting flight. Then you go stand in a long security line, even though you already went through security TWICE in India before leaving there. Oye. By the time we were done with all that, it was 7:30am so it took 2 hours. Then we could finally relax and go eat breakfast. Then wasted a couple hours more until our 11:15am flight to Tampa. Touched down in Tampa around 2:10pm, what a relief. By 4pm we were home as I already said. (we are an hour from the airport) I hope this paragraph wasn't too boring! Just thought I would add details.

Now poor Kavi seems to have caught a cold that showed up on our travel home. His nose started running like crazy on the way home, and he is sneezing and coughing. Last year after our trip he was sick with rotavirus, a stomach/intestinal virus that I caught too. The first time I went to India, I came home with a horrible cold. I wonder if it's possible to go on a trip to India and NOT get sick afterwards? I don't want to get sick! Nooo.

We slept good last night though, overall, which is good considering our bodies already were used to the Indian time zone that is 9.5 hours ahead of EST. I hope we can conquer the 9.5 hour jet lag in a short time frame. (I can hope! hehe) I thought this would be a short entry but I keep thinking of more to write right now.

So we were home around 4pm yesterday and by 5pm I wanted to lay in bed, just to feel how comfy it is.(Indian beds are generally very hard.) My husband called to order pizza for pick up and was going to stop at the nearby grocery store for a few necessities. By the time he left to go get it, I couldn't leave the bed! I needed sleep desperately. So there I stayed until almost 5 am this morning. I missed out on the hot and fresh pizza. My husband tried waking me up to tell me he was back with it, but I just couldn't wake up enough for it. So then when I woke up this morning, I ate cold pizza. (I like it that way too!) Kavi also woke up at that time - well, he was the one who woke us up before 5am by crying, and we have been awake since. He woke up a couple times overnight crying or needing a diaper change but then slept again.

I will need to adjust to being back home before I can do my normal blog routine again. It's a strange feeling, after being away from home for 20 days(just shy of 3 weeks), being in a completely different culture, and then being back home again. I really don't feel like doing anything besides sitting around. Kavi has already gone back to his usual things like covering the floor with random toys, opening drawers and taking out utensils, taking picture frames off tables and generally making a big mess, lol. I don't feel like cleaning it up and I wish he would stop putting everything on the floor! :P Maybe it's a good sign though that he is already readjusting to being back home. Though I'd really like if he stops throwing his toys around the room.

Traveling this far and long with a toddler is not a good idea. Just telling you. It is possible, and Kavi fared pretty well on the flights. He had his own seat, which was very helpful(a carseat in his own seat). But going so far away is incredibly hard and exhausting, for both the child and parents. Kavi had diarrhea issues while away too and he still isn't over it completely. He had major time adjustment issues as well that turned him into a very unhappy little boy who only wanted mommy and daddy for the first week. That was a bit torturous for all involved. A whole WEEK of crankiness from the usually happy little boy because his schedule was completely off and everything was different.

Well that was long! I will post more pictures soon. :)