Part 3: Getting home

Let me start off by saying that I never want to get back on an airplane with my children. The abbreviated version... Joe had to leave early; despite attempts to get his passport extended, the State Department, the Embassy, the Airlines, nor Customs were much help. One agency actually suggested that Joe catch a flight to Tijuana, walk across the border, and catch another flight home...but I won't tell you who told us that because we never had that conversation. (Do you feel safe now?) So, Pat and I were left to travel with the 3 kids. I had planned Grady's feedings with the flight schedules, as much as possible, so of course everything went wrong. Our flight was about 2 hours late leaving Cabo, which left seriously grumpy and hungry kids because by the time we got into Denver, get through the enormous customs line (we were last in line due to waiting for our gate-checked stroller), get our luggage, re-check it to Tulsa, walk/run the 18 million miles from the international terminal to security, get through security (refer to Part 1 for more on security fun), navigate the gazillion escalators and elevators to arrive at the outer-most point of the terminal where (once again) they were announcing final boarding for the flight. During this time, I had wrapped Grady in the Moby, had his car seat in the stroller, Ellery sideways in his car seat holding onto all our documents and my carry on, Molly sitting on the back of the stroller with me dragging the whole load by the handle of Grady's seat, all while holding another car seat in my other hand. Pat was packing our roller board, the girls backpacks, the diaper bag, and a car seat. I'm sure we were quite a site. Besides the fun of getting through the airport, there were the actual flights. As I've determined earlier, Grady is not a traveler, so I won't even go into detail about the crying, not feeding and not sleeping on his part. Over the course of the two flights (3 1/2 hours and 1 1/2 hours), I visited the shoebox bathroom on the airplane no less than 15 times. If one of the girls didn't have to go, Grady was constantly pooping and I was trying to change diapers on my lap. If that wasn't bad enough, I ran out of baby wipes on the last flight (due to the many diaper changes), plus they were low on potable water (the water they use for lavs and coffee...not exactly in that order), so the last few times I was in the lav, I was trying to rinse the soap off of my hands with barely a misting spray of water. The good news...we all made it home. All in all, the travelling was worth the wonderful week spent with our family.