The Travel

My trips, especially the ones I take with my children on planes, are usually bookended by the horror stories of "how we got there" and "how we got home." Tales of delayed or cancelled flights, sick children, races through ariports, rude airline employees... I have told them all.

And I know you are curious.


Our flights to get there were happily uneventful. I purposely scheduled an earlier flight to NY to avoid afternoon thunderstorms, and this meant we had about 6 hours of waiting at JFK before we could board out flight. We were zone 4, which meant we had to wait to get on the plane while crowds of people pushed past us to get on first (I don't get that when there is assigned seating. the SEATS are THERE. It's not like you're going to get anything better.) Once on the plane, I got a little miffed when the man sitting diagonally asked for earplugs because "I'm surrounded by children" and was feeling quite smug that the noisiest child was the 2-year-old in the seat in front of him - the one with the mother who freaked out because he started to cry and kept pushing the pacifier in his mouth even though he wasn't crying. Then Andy chose that moment to get a night terror (crying in his sleep, inability to be woken up or consoled, all experts say to just let the baby cry it out. Not good advice at 30,000 feet.) Oh, well.

But all of our luggage made it, our car was actually a station wagon, and we made it to the house in record time!

On the trip back... well, as soon as I took the exit for the airport Nick threw up all over his pants. I told myself we'd change him as soon as we got into the airport and had a few minutes. We spent time shoving the car seats into the suitcase, waited on line to get our passports checked, waited on line to get our luggage checked, and by the time I got to the bathroom I realized I forgot to pack a change of clothing for the older boys, so I wedged Nick into a pair of Andrew' shorts, and stuck his shorts into a plastic bag instead of throwing them away, which was my first instinct.

And good thing, too. Because after rushing through security and through customs, and then somehow almost immediately through the gate and into a long hallway where they once AGAIN checked our passports and boarding passes and asked us the same questions about our luggage, after getting on the plane and the plane taking off, and the kids falling asleep... Nathan had an accident and needed to change into something. Feeling awful about making him wear a pair of shorts someone else had thrown up on, I make Nick change back into his own shorts, and wedged Nathan into Andy's shorts. Thank Goodness Andy didn't need a change of clothing on the plane, or I would have had to bring someone back into the country naked.

After the plane landed we had to stand in a line to have our passports checked, then we had to claim our luggage and walk through a customs checkpoint where a man counted the number of people and the number of bags, then we had to stand on another line to re-check our bags to Boston, where they started running around like ants when we told them our flight was less than ninety minutes way. Then we had to take our shoes off and go through security, then we had to find our gate, and when we did our flight was boarding. We then sat on the tarmac for fifty minutes before finally taking off. Only one of our bags didn't make it to Boston, and we found it on our doorstep when we woke up at 3am the next morning. (Thanks, Andy.)