motion.

word of the day: motion \ˈmō-shən\ an act, process, or instance of changing place: movement

Meet Lily, the travel champion of one-year-olds:

 In the past week, she traveled 2,000 miles in the car.  She slept in 3 different states, 5 different rooms, and 3 different beds.

Hardly a complaint.  

To say I was nervous was an understatement.  Lily is a bit of a loose cannon--she doesn't often exist in a gray area of discontent.  She's either happy or screaming mad, and I wasn't sure what hours of car-seat confinement would do to our independent mover.  She proved resilient, however, and I breathed a sigh of relief.  

(She'll only smile in pictures if she can actually see herself in the screen.)

I spent a lot of our travels staring out the window in between entertaining Lily, feeding her a reasonable amount of snacks (per your recommendation, Jake), and sleeping.  And, as I looked out my window, I watched a lot of cars go by from here to New York. 

I often think about cars as they pass by me on roads and wonder about the people inside them.  It fascinates me that for a moment, our lives intersect.  One single moment.  After they pass, I know I will never again see them, so I wonder sometimes where they are going.  What their car is moving towards. 

Traveling is a funny thing because it involves forward motion.  Point A to Point B.  However, long distance trips always make me feel a bit stuck. Because while I'm trapped (a hyperbolic choice of words, of course) in a car, the world continues to move around me.  People go about their daily lives whether or not I'm in them.  

It makes me think of this episode of Growing Pains where Mike Seaver gets sick and can't go to school.  At some point, he realizes that people still went to school and had a great time without him.  It was kind of a shocking epiphany if I remember the episode right.  

I guess I was reminded in my 2,000 miles that I'm not the center of the universe.  People continue in their own forward motion despite the changes to my own.  

Are you supposed to think that much on a road trip?  It's possible that the lack of air conditioning in our final two hour stretch made me a bit loopy.

In any case, Lily reigns the travel queen.

For now.  She is still a loose cannon, after all. 

And there's the smile.  She's so vain.