Maya is getting old enough now that we can warm her up a little for upcoming adventures and she’ll actually remember them and anticipate them. I had been prepping her for a few weeks for our family trip to Denver this past September, discussing some of the different things we might do. She had been excited for weeks about riding on the airplane again, and thanks to her good nature and the iPad, she managed the trip pretty well.

Ian had a rough run. A couple days before we left, he sprouted a fever. There were really no other symptoms that we could perceive, and we figured it fell into the “it’s a virus and has to run its course” category. He was still not feeling well when we left unspeakably early for the airport, so it’s really no surprise at all that he wasn’t a huge fan of the flight. Luckily he slept for a good half of it, so it could have been worse. While he was awake though, he was very vocal.

Thanks to the inhuman hour of our flight, we had some time to do a few things on our travel day. We had a delightful late breakfast at a place called Four Friends Kitchen. It’s a nice, vaguely hipster-esque place, but it’s also very kid-friendly. Maya got crayons upon arrival, and they had a wall of etch-a-sketches she could play with. The food was fantastic, and except for Ian trying to bash his head in on the table, the kids were fairly well-behaved.

The first place we went after breakfast was the Butterfly Pavilion. Early in our trip discussion, I had asked Maya a few times if she’d be interested in seeing some butterflies while in Denver, and she of course said yes. But in her toddler brain, since then, anytime I said Denver, she thought “butterflies.” These were so indelibly linked that she thought the Butterfly Pavilion *was* Denver. Through the rest of the Denver trip she’d ask us over and over again if we could go back to Denver and see the butterflies. We tried explaining that the city was Denver and we were visiting lots of attractions in it, not just the butterfly place, but I’m not entirely sure we’ve cemented that idea yet.

The Butterfly Pavilion was neat, and suitable for kids Maya’s age (not quite 3). She got to touch a tarantula (or rather the tarantula got to touch her), there was a play area for the kids, and she was able to see lots of different invertebrates throughout the facility. The butterfly rainforest was really pleasant, especially when considering the variety of gorgeous butterflies. We had told Maya to be very gentle with them and only touch with the backs of her fingers to discourage her impulse to grab them. She had a great deal of fun brushing their wings with her fingers and watching them flutter away. However, we learned toward the end of our visit that we should have kept her from touching them at all. Their wings can be irreversibly damaged with even the lightest contact.

After a nap at the hotel followed by a bit of time playing in the pool, we all went out to the Kokopelli Beer Company to have some pizza and beer. Their take on a standard Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza was delicious. They sauced the pie with barbecue sauce, dotted it with cream cheese, and at the end added large chunks of toasted coconut. It was even good cold the next day. I probably shouldn’t tell the Internet this, but Maya is a big fan of beer. We generally let her have little tastes of whatever we are eating and drinking, so she also got to sample the brews at Kokopelli. Ian, ever the man of action, at one point decided he’d like some too, and his little cobra arm struck out and grabbed Sean’s beer and dumped a goodly amount of it all over our table, our food, and himself. He went through the rest of his trip with a beer-stained bib. I guess I could have rinsed it out at the hotel, but generally by the time we finished with our evenings, I was ready for little more than a few minutes reading before crashing. Parents of the year, right here.

Back in September, I’d have described Ian as an early riser, but generally a good sleeper. Unfortunately, sick and traveling Ian hadn’t gotten the memo, and every night on our trip, he was up at some point. None of us slept very well.

The next day, after a terrible hotel breakfast that had us vowing to eat at restaurants the rest of the trip, we made our way to the Denver Zoo. I need to back up a little. You know how toddlers go through phases where they are completely infatuated with certain things? The current obsession timeframe will be heretofore known as Maya’s Giraffe Period. She has several giraffe variants at home that she plays with regularly. She’s aware that the little horns on top of their heads are called ossicones (though she says “bossicones”). And she chose to be a giraffe for halloween. When Sean found out that we could feed the giraffes at the zoo, we knew we’d have to get Maya in on it. We waited in line and paid $5 for three leaves of romaine lettuce to feed to the giraffes. Maya was able to stand by herself and reach her little arm up with the lettuce leaf clutched in her hand. The giraffe then leaned way, way down over the fence, reached out with its enormous tongue and took the lettuce from her, crunch-crunch-crunching away while Maya giggled. She loved it. The experience was so fantastic that we bought another set of lettuce leaves so she could do it again. Even now, months later, Maya still talks about feeding those giraffes lettuce and how they took it from her hand and crunched it up.

We kept the kids out way past nap time, so after a good rest, Sean went out and picked up Indian food from Yak and Yeti, and we had a picnic in Maya’s room at the hotel. Why Maya’s room? Here’s how it went down. After looking through condos, we thought we’d make our lives simpler by renting a hotel room instead. Sean found an option that had two bedrooms whose doors closed leaving a third room in the middle that was both kitchenette and living room. That middle room is where Ian was sleeping when our dinner arrived, so we all went into Maya’s room (which had more available floor space than ours), and feasted on the floor. Again, Maya loved it.

The next morning after a serviceable breakfast at Goody’s Eatery, we visited the Denver Children’s Museum. The great thing about this morning is that Ian’s fever was finally gone. The sad thing is that some nasal congestion had taken its place.

Unfortunately, a great deal of the children’s museum was undergoing renovations when we visited. If we had come in November/December, I suspect that museum would have been pretty phenomenal. As it was, it was still pretty neat. There were areas for Maya to dress up and pretend to be a firefighter, a veterinarian, etc. There was a GIANT kitchen to play in. There was a model back yard to tromp around in, complete with costumes (we think the one we put on Maya was a squirrel). They had a really neat bubble area, and Maya had a good time filling the bubbles with smoke and watching them pop. There was a baby area as well where Ian got to stretch his legs and roll around for a while.

The outside area was really nice. They had a giant sand pit with all kinds of trucks and buckets and shovels to play with. Their water area was multi-tiered and entertained Maya for a really long time. They had a ropes area to climb around on and a building area that looked wonderfully dangerous (think: giant lincoln logs).

We again kept the kids there way too late and were trying, trying, trying to get Maya out of there so we could go to another brew pub for lunch. We were basically at the brewpub when I realized I had left my jacket at the children’s museum, so back we went. I retrieved the jacket, but by then it was just stupidly late, and rather than subject our children to a long wait for food (and subjecting a restaurant full of patrons to our tired and hungry kids), we went back to the hotel and had leftovers for lunch. Picnic again!!

That afternoon, I hung out in the hotel room and let an exhausted Ian sleep while Sean and Maya had another swim in the hotel pool. We all felt reasonably relaxed, so we decided to go to a Japanese restaurant called Sakana. This proved to be a mistake. Let me make this point up front – the food was good. Sean was content with his ramen and my sushi was really fresh and flavorful. Maya had pretty much decided that she was all done with listening to us at all at this point. She wouldn’t sit in her seat, wouldn’t eat without us feeding her, and certainly wouldn’t keep her hands off things that weren’t hers to touch. Ian, despite having had a really good nap, was disinterested in the restaurant experience. He squirmed and yelled almost from the beginning. We thought he’d chill out once he had food to eat, but we were wrong. I took him out for a walk while Sean and Maya ate, and then Sean did the same for me. By the end, Ian was flat out screaming and Maya tore a decorative grating off one of their walls. I expect they weren’t sorry to see us go.

Ahead of this vacation, I had also prepped Maya that we’d get to see mountains when we went to Denver. She’d repeat the words and look at pictures in her storybooks, but I don’t think the concept really sunk in. The next day, after a very good breakfast at Early Bird, we drove up to Rocky Mountain National Park. The drive itself was beautiful. The road curved back and forth as it climbed ever higher toward the park.

Then we heard a noise. “Ian, did you barf?” I asked. As the vomit aroma filled our vehicle, I changed my question, “Maya, did you barf?” She told me she hadn’t but that Ian had. We pulled over and I went to Ian’s side of the car, prepared for the worst, but nope, he was clean. It turns out that Maya had barfed after all! Our guess was that a combination of a belly full of chocolate milk (her favorite thing at breakfast that morning) and curvy roads had caused her some motion sickness. We changed her shirt and cleaned out her car seat as best we could. After a few minutes of her poking around outside, and against much protest, we reloaded and finished our journey into the park. We drove directly to the Bear Lake area, where we planned to hike so that everyone could stretch their legs a bit.

The hike around Bear Lake is short (0.6 miles), flat, and well-maintained. Maya walked the entire thing on her own. I had Ian strapped to my back in the carrier, and Sean kept an eye on Maya as she touched leaves and gathered sticks. She wanted desperately to go in the water, even after we let her stick her hand in to feel how icy cold it was. Crazy kid. She’s very proud of the fact that she made the entire trip by herself. “I hiked awound the entiwe wake!”

The leaves don’t really change color in Texas. Yes, I know, brown is a color too, but the vibrant colors I associate with the autumns of my childhood simply don’t happen in central Texas. We were lucky to see the beginnings of the fall color change as we drove through the Rocky Mountains. Little bursts of yellow and red highlighted vistas and mountain and tree framed lakes. The mostly evergreen-coated mountainsides were dotted with pockets of color.

We had a late lunch at Baba’s Gyros and Burgers (whose gyros and burgers were both pretty terrific) in Estes Park and then headed back into RMNP to drive as much as we could of the Trail Ridge Road. That drive was wonderful, and I truly wish we had had time to both cover the whole thing and get out and hike more. I’m not sure whether it was the cold wind, the vertigo-inducing drops from the highway, or the Rockies themselves that took my breath away. We stopped and got out of the car a few times. To her delight, Maya had little rodents (pikas maybe?) nearly crawl across her feet at one stop. She got pummeled with icy wind at another. Ian mostly slept.

Even stopping our drive early, we still got back pretty late, so Sean went out and grabbed dinner at Kyoto Teriyaki. Again, we picnicked in Maya’s room. The food was solid, though I thought they were a little stingy with their vegetable tempura. Once the kids went to bed, Sean and I tried to pack up as much as we could so we’d be ready to hit the ground running the next day.

Our last day in Denver, we visited the Downtown Aquarium. It didn’t open till 11, and we were worried we couldn’t do it justice before running off to lunch and then to the airport. As it was, even at Maya pace, we were able to see everything we wanted to see in about an hour. The set-up was really great for a small kid. Many of the tanks were visible down to the floor, so Maya could get really close to the various sea creatures. One of her favorite ones was the otter tank. I held her up to see the otter sitting above water and when he dove, I stood her back on the floor so she could watch him swim around and around in the water. It was great!

She also got to see turtles, seahorses, jellyfish, and an octopus. And sharks, so many sharks. She pet sea stars and sting rays. Inexplicably, there was a tiger there and she got to see him as well. All told, I think she really enjoyed it. Ian actually liked the visit as well. The zoo animals were a little far away for him to really understand, I think. The fish were right in front of his face and often very colorful.

After we finished at the aquarium, we went to the Wynkoop brewpub and had a really nice lunch. Sean and I (with a tiny assist from Maya) split a five-beer flight, all of which were pretty delicious. The food itself was decent enough, but the service was outstanding. They were easy-going about the kids and kept our schedule in mind throughout the meal. If we lived there, we’d go back. Ian slept through lunch, which I’m sure helped keep the meal peaceful. It was a nice break for Sean and me before we weathered the chaos of the car rental place, the airport, and the drive home.

Maya feel asleep on the way to the rental car drop-off, and I think we may have startled her a little when we woke her up. Plus, we had been asking a lot of her on this vacation. She had the mother of all meltdowns right there at the rental car return. I kept track of a wailing, thrashing Maya while Sean scurried around uninstalling car seats and unloading bags. it was … weird.

Everyone dealt reasonably well with the airport. Security with a car seat, a stroller, and two small children is a bit of a circus, but once we made it through there, cookies and bathroom breaks and escalator rides filled the time before our flight boarded. I thought I was home free when Ian passed out during takeoff, but he barely slept a half hour before he woke up. And he stayed awake for the entire remainder of the flight. And by awake, I mean yelling. I fed him snacks and let him play with my phone, but none of it did a bit of good. Ian was through with vacation, and everyone within probably a four or five seat radius heard about it. The poor man sitting next to me had kindly swapped seats with the lady who was originally seated in our row so that she could sit next to her son. After Ian’s performance, I suspect that man no longer believes in karma.

I can’t work out whether I’ve told the story of a successful trip or a failure. Sean and I both consider it to have been a good, albeit difficult, trip. This is the first time we’ve taken Maya on vacation where we feel like she really understood that she was somewhere else and doing fun things. It was incredible to see her excited about tarantulas and otters and giraffes. I loved how much pleasure she took in that walk around the lake. And Ian did as well as he could have given his age and the illness early in the trip. We set out on vacation thinking we’d keep the kids as close to their normal schedules as possible. That notion quickly went out the window and we just played it by ear each day. We pushed those kids hard. Meals and nap times were often late. When in Austin, they have a fair amount of downtime at home to just play. On vacation, it was activity after activity. Even only planning one thing a day, we still kept them hopping. I think for a nine month old and a not quite three year old, they handled it fairly well.