I don’t think this is a shock to anyone, but Kaia is obsessed with planes. She always looks forward to being at the airport. She loves watching planes on the runway and in the air. She knows how to identify a gate. She loves talking about going on the airplane and to the “hotel-o.” She’s also had some toddler demands and comments in terms of travel.

“Don’t say no to me; that’s not nice!” she said assertively while in the backseat of an Uber ride. Yes, I say this to her jokingly sometimes.

“I want to go back to the hotel-o!” she yelped, in the car on the way back to our home.

When we checked into the hotel in Montreal at midday today, Chris was unhappy with the supposed “upgraded” room we got. I think the hotel asserted it was a room upgrade simply because it was a higher floor (the worst – who the heck cares? In this case, I think size matters most, especially when you have a young child). Chris went back and forth with them on the hotel app, and finally, they gave us an upgraded room, but not just any upgraded room: the vice presidential suite on the highest floor just below the club lounge floor. When we took our bags from the original room into the VP suite, Kaia ran around excitedly in this new monstrosity of a suite: It had a large entry way, a huge living room, dining room, small kitchen, and 1.5 bathrooms. The en suite bathroom had double sinks and a separate large shower (Chris’s favorite) and a soaking tub. She kept on giggling and squealing over and over while running, “This is a big hotel-o! This is a BIG hotel-o!” I did some crappy un-athletic “cartwheels” for her to revel in our ridiculous amount of open space, and Pookster followed and attempted her own toddler versions.

Because we strongly restrict how much packaged food/sweets Kaia gets, Chris had this idea that when we offered to give her something like a fig bar, we would just let her “hold” it and not actually open and eat it. The way we’d get her to calm down in the midst of a tantrum is we’d tell her “as soon as we got on the bus” (“we’re never getting on a bus!” Chris retorted), then she could open the fig bar. And so she’s kind of gone along with this and not really called us out on our bs yet. I told my friend this, who has two littles (one who is one year older than Kaia), and she laughed and said, “You know that’s not going to last, right, and in the next year, she will call you out and realize you’re lying?!”

One time, I tried to change it to, “You can open it when we get on the train.” She corrected me: “No, we open it when we get on the bus!” she said in her declarative statement tone.

I just love these moments so much. How is she developing her sentence structure so much?!