Winter travel woes

Tuesday and Wednesday this week were very LONG days!  Tuesday morning we got the babies up at 4am to get to the airport to catch a 6am flight.  We got everything unloaded and dragged into the airport only to find out that our flight had been cancelled!  I was seething mad for about 15 minutes, but then we decided we had to let it go and just move on.  We were scheduled on a Delta flight at 5:30pm, getting into Seattle at 10pm.  We decided to make the best of our day and came home and made a yummy breakfast and tried to keep the babies awake and reasonably happy until a close-to-normal nap time.

our yummy breakfast of eggs, bacon, & toast

After naptime we took the babies swimming at the Y thinking that would help wear them out for our evening flight.  While they were taking their afternoon nap, Michelle and I did some serious cleaning so that assuming we ever got to leave State College, we would come home to a nice clean house.

hands & knees scrubbing the floor under the table!

Our second flight of the day was delayed such that we would miss our connecting flight to Seattle, likely leaving us stranded in Detroit.  That sounded like an absolute nightmare so I immediately got on the phone to get rebooked because I'd much rather be stuck at home or even in Chicago where at least we have family who could rally to help out!  Flights were hard to come by, but we did get rebooked on a flight that would have us spending the night in Chicago and flying out a noon the next day.  So we rushed everyone out of the house and got to the airport only to find out after we'd checked in and gone through security that the runway was closed and that our second flight of the day was cancelled.  There were no seats out of State College the next day so we decided to take a flight out of Harrisburg, about 2 hours away and just hoped and prayed that the freezing rain would stop so we could make the drive!

airport entertainment

big strong girl

So at 2:45am on Wednesday our alarms went off and we dragged the babies out of bed and tossed them in the car.  Thankfully the roads weren't too too bad and we made it to Harrisburg just fine.  Our flight got off without a hitch and we were very lucky that we got an entire row of six seats to ourselves in economy plus!  The babies had lots of room to stand and walk around without needing to invade the aisle.  It was such a luxury! And yet, it was still a lot of work and we just kept thinking, "how are we going to do this without all this space?!"  

We had a nice long 3 hour layover in O'Hare which gave us time to get them a walking nap in the carriers and time to run around.  O'Hare has a wonderful "Kids on the Fly" play area that the kids loved!  They ran around contentedly playing for over an hour.

cutest little pilots

measuring up against the bats in the "cargo"

so many balls

Mama & Ellie in the control tower

Isaiah LOVED plane watching

walking to our next flight...

The seating arrangements on the second flight were, well, far from ideal.  When they rebooked us they put us in three middle seats.  I got some major attitude from the gate agent when I asked about switching our seat & I said if they didn't want to switch our seats, then I hoped that the other passengers wouldn't mind keeping our 18 month old entertained. =)  Since we had been rebooked into economy plus and people pay extra for aisle/window seats the gate agents wouldn't ask them to switch seats so I got moved back to the back of the bus with the extra baby.  Michelle was in the middle bulkhead seat with one baby and I was in row 34 with my lap baby and the baby in the car seat.  It wasn't the easiest thing to get the car seat installed with two toddlers in that tiny little space, but I managed.  And although I was pretty annoyed that we were separated from Michelle the flight actually went pretty well and we had only one tiny bit of crying/fussing.  We were very lucky that we had a very nice mom with her 2.5 year old right behind us so the kiddos spent a lot of time standing on the seat playing peekaboo and "chatting" with her little guy.  I'll write another post about how we managed to entertain three 17mo olds on the flights, but probably not until we get home!  We got some beautiful views of the cascades on our flight and I couldn't have been much happier when I saw Seattle coming into view out the plane window!

me & the girls in the back of the plane...

gorgeous view from the plane