Oh the Joy of Flights

Kids waiting at the airport

(#2 Boy is holding his lovey and a chick that he became attached to at his grandparent's home that they let him keep. He still loves that little thing.)

Flights didn't go as smoothly as we would have liked. We were already traveling with a lay over in TX both ways and arriving in Mountain Time at 11pm (1am Eastern time) and leaving Mountain Time at 6am (at the airport at 4am). The kids were pretty good on the airplane rides but the whole process of making it through security and getting settled onto the planes are always a trick. At security we use a lot of bins: throw lovies and blanket into one bin, 6 pairs of shoes in another, coats piled up in another always over flowing, along with a bin for each of the two laptops that we have to unpack, another for random items from the pockets. We also have to get luggage in line, pull kids out of the stroller and get it folded up to go through the machine, convince the children that they need to walk through the metal detector alone. Have whatever milk baby is drinking inspected. After taking up the whole table area we arrive at the other side merely to have to try and get everything back into a similar order that we had before having to completely unpack. On the way home we also had the excitement of being stopped by security because of the random Christmas toys (including a few different cars/trucks and a disco ball) that we had packed into the suitcase that got to be unpacked and rescanned a couple of times.

On the way to Mountain time we arrived at 2am Mountain time instead of the 11pm time we were expecting, yes, three hours late! We waited around in TX for the crew to arrive. We loaded the plane and tried to get settled. #4 Boy fell off the seat and whacked his head on the arm rest and started to scream. I grabbed him and stood up quickly hitting my own head on the overhead bins. We gave him the bottle we were going to hold onto for take off so that he would calm down. Then we waited while they did a maintenance check, during which time # Boy fell asleep, merely to find out that we couldn't use that plane and had to wait around for another one. We had to wake #2 Boy up enough to walk over to another terminal, unpack all of our luggage, carry kids and 8 bags off the plane, and wait for our stroller to be unloaded.

So, after having that adventure on the way to Mountain time we were a bit nervous as we boarded the plane in Mountain time to go to TX, especially since while we were sitting there they announced that they were going to have maintenance look closer at one of the doors. Luckily we had a 2.5 hour lay over in TX and we didn't have to unload the plane. We did have to wait while the wings were defrosted again, but that didn't take too long. After arriving in TX we found out that we were suppose to leave from the same gate we had arrived at just two hours later. As we sat there they had gotten the flight half loaded onto the plane we had just deboarded before telling people that they would be cancelling that flight due to a door problem (So, we made it to where we were suppose to be, but how safe was the plane?). So we were one flight away from having the exact same problem that we had dealt with on the way to Mountain time. That also meant that we wouldn't be leaving from that gate and had to haul it to a different gate. We did get there with a little bit of time to spare. The picture above is at that gate while the children were watching in awe at someone changing a light bulb.