Preparing for Battle- er, Travel

We are hopefully under a cease-fire in our household (Battle: Parents vs 3 Year Old) for the duration of the trip to Florida. Each day lately brings a series of fights with Ellery as she is apparently skipping years 3 through 12 and moving straight to the turbulent teens.
Fight 1: Go to the bathroom when you get up (response: "NO!!").

Fight 2: You may watch 1 cartoon before school (response: "MAH-AHM!!").

Fight 3: I made you eggs for breakfast (response: "I wanted yogurt!" "I wanted cereal!" "I wanted (whatever Mom/Dad did not make!")- you get the picture.

Fight 4: Let's get your shoes on (response: "I don't want these shoes/socks/clothes/etc".

And so on....You have to visualize that these situations occur all in the span of about 20 minutes, are accompanied by screaming, stomping, and often throwing of whatever is close at hand, and are so predictably repetitive that Scott and I feel as though we are banging our heads against a wall when we try to curb them. And those are just the morning ones- the evening dinner/bath/bedtime is not fit for this blog, because I can't describe it without a litany of four-letter words.

So, in a nutshell, I am super excited to get on a plane and sit in close proximity to the whirling dervish of a child that Scott currently refers to as "La Diabla". I am hoping that traveling with her aunt Lubelle and cousin Ruby will help, and maybe we will get lucky and sit next to an oblivious teenager who spends the entire flight plugged into an i-whatever and doesn't notice that his row-mate is lobbing half-chewed goldfish crackers at her mother and infant sister.

We love her, so dearly, and she is an amazing and creative and intelligent child. And we cannot wait to hand her over to her grandparents.

Oh, and Merritt is good.