California Dreamin' Part I

Allison was given a choice for her birthday this year: She could have a birthday party or go visit her new cousin in California. Luckily she picked to visit her new cousin Samara (smart kid)! We were all very excited to go but I was kind of dreading the flight out there. When I was looking into buying tickets, everything was so expensive ($500+ per ticket) so when a good deal finally came along I quickly grabbed it. The bad part was that our flight was taking off at 6pm eastern time and was supposed to land around 11pm pacific time which would have felt like 2am to us. Not the most ideal time (in fact, downright brutal when travelling with two little ones) but I figured we'd make do. Well someone must have been watching out for us because on the day we were scheduled to fly (around 11:30am), I found that our the second leg of our flight (from Houston to San Francisco) was delayed an hour and 45 min which means we weren't going to get in until almost midnight PT or like 3am ET! I knew that just wasn't going to work so I called the airline and there just so happened to be a flight out three hours earlier which we could switch to for no charge. The reservation agent was able to get us seats (but not necessarily together - we'd have to figure that out at the airport). We were pretty much packed but I was hoping to have cleaned up the house a little more before we left. So we gathered all our belongings and scurried out the door to try and catch that flight. It might sound like we had a lot of time but it was an hour drive to the airport and we had to stop at Jeff's office because he had to submit a project before we left. Plus was had to park the car at Park N Fly and take a shuttle to the airport. My stress level was already high at this point because I knew we had to fly and I absolutely HATE flying - I do not handle it well at all. I probably should take some sort of Xanax or something before I fly but I prefer not to put drugs into my body so I just try and deal with it as best I can. So on top of my normal flying stress, I was now stressing that we would make it to the airport on time to make that flight. When all was said and done...we made it...about 15 minutes before the plane boarded. The timing worked out quite well, despite my anxiety and nuttiness, all the while I'm with Mr. cool cucumber Jeff who has no frets about getting there on time. Why can't I be like that?? As for the seating situation - we normally sit two and two (one row in frot of the other) and each kid gets a window. We weren't able to get that but they said we could have three seats together in the last row and then another seat in an emergency exit row (about 15 rows up). I saw the big smile on Jeff's face and said, okay I'll sit with the kids in the butt of the plane while you enjoy your extra leg room. After we boarded the plane, Jeff couldn't deal with the guilt of leaving me to tend to two kids by myself (especially knowing what a bad flyer I am) so he (according to him) "made a huge sacrifice" by giving up his emergency exit row seat so he could sit across the aisle from us. He's the one who "sacrificed" but I still ended up with both kids. Funny how that works. But I digress...the flights went well (despite the second leg being a bit delayed)- kids did great, as usual. Daniel finally fell asleep on the second flight about 15 minutes before we landed. Figures. Uncle Michael picked us up and we finally arrived at their house around 10pm PT. We all went to bed and woke up the next morning to the soft cry of this beautiful little girl:

To be continued...