Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Airports, airplanes, and kids

Of course traveling with children brings about much chaos. We get to the airport and through security and almost immediately the kids start to fight. At this point my husband realizes he has left his charger for his laptop at home. So I call my mom and send her to my house to get it and have her bring it to the airport. Our flight has been delayed for an hour. Joy.
My husband has his charger and just when I think we cannot handle another minute in this airport, we get to board. We get Butterfly's car seat installed and everyone else boards the plane and we are off. 20 minutes later we are at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. We eat lunch and then get to where we need to be to board the plane. Here there is a lot of chaos. My kids start to get irritable and panic. This is when I am so thankful that my friend Lynn convinced me months ago to get an ergo. I totally love my ergo. Again we get on the plane and get everyone settled. Butterfly falls asleep within minutes of takeoff. A little later they serve dinner and Butterfly is still sleeping. When they are about to clean up I decide to wake her so I can get some food in her. BIG mistake. Waking her meant she decided she was not going to sleep again until an hour and a half before the flight lands in Amsterdam. In other words she did not sleep until just before they served a light breakfast. She did not eat. I must say that Witchlet was a perfect angel on this flight. Goobie-kins was talking so much though that he was making me want to test out my abilities of parachuting. Are there even parachutes on those planes? Could I survive the minus 72 degree outside temps if there were? For a good couple hours Butterfly fussed and I am sure that if she was not so damn cute that the other passengers were ready to toss her out too. Thankfully she is cute and they let her stay.
After a couple hours in Amsterdam we board the final flight. This one is with KLM. Major difference between this flight and the other flights. This time the crew checked out the installation of Butterfly's seat. Making sure that it was appropriate for air travel, installed securely, they gave me the required belt for a lap held child in case we decided to take her out of the seat. Now we had her out of the seat many many times on the trip from Detroit without this safety belt thing, but the people on KLM wanted to be sure I had safe options. They also gave us a special flotation device for her since the ones on the plane are too big for a baby. Overall I felt the KLM crew did many things that made the last part of the flight easier. I would LOVE it if we could be with them on the long trip across the ocean. And of course, Butterfly fell asleep before they served sandwiches. By the time I got to take a few hour nap, I had been up almost 24 hours.

2 comments:

Kate said...

You are so brave compared to me! I decided to skip the annual trip to our summer cottage 8 hrs. away in a car because I thought Dylan would fuss the whole time. I couldn't imagine a flight to Amsterdam!!

The Neally Family said...

Your last flight sounded nice with the crew being so helpful with the seats. I think a trip like that would be stressful even without kids. Now you can just enjoy your vacation.