When we were dating in college, I always went to visit Johnny in North Carolina for the Fourth of July. We thought we'd continue the tradition and take the girls to visit Grammie and Grampie this year. Now, for some odd reason there are no direct flights from Kansas City to Raleigh, so we had a connection in Baltimore. Not a big deal, thought we.
We got to the Kansas City airport around 10:30am for our noon flight. Got a nice coffee, a blueberry muffin. You know, just living the life. I will interrupt here and say that Johnny told me Olive was dressed like a clown for this flight.
We arrived in Baltimore around 3:00, preparing to get on the quick 45 minute flight around 5:30pm. Lila and I decided to stand in line at the airport Chipotle while Johnny and Olive held down a table for us, making friends with an elderly couple going to visit their grandkids in California. While in line, Lila informed me, "Dat yady yooks pretty in her hair brush." I translated for the woman, "My daughter thinks your hair is pretty." We ate our dinner, and checked the departure monitors, noticing that our flight was delayed an hour. Bummer, but no big deal. We went to find our gate and settled down for a bit. At this point, it started hailing really hard. I suppose that should have been a red flag.
Rumors started floating around the gate area that there was a bad hurricane along the East Coast. Fabulous. Before we knew it, the flight was no longer delayed until 6:30 but was now 8:30. A girl sitting near us was growing angry and decided that she was going to go rent a car and drive to Raleigh. "Anyone who wants to can join!" she declared. Johnny and I thought about it briefly, but then decided the five hour drive wasn't worth it; our flight would get in around the same time anyway. Ba ha ha! It's funny, now.
So about three hours into our layover, Lila was really doing an excellent job. She traded off her time between playing on the iPad, pretending with her Disney princess dolls, watching cartoons, and running around in circles. Johnny decided to take Olive on a walk to see if he could get her to take a nap. While he was gone, Lila was squatting on the floor, looking at something, and then whined to me, "I have to go tinkle!" Now this was odd because Lila is not totally/anywhere near being potty trained yet, and she had a diaper on. So I kind of said, "Ok well just go," but I looked at her and realized that she had just gone and it had somehow come out the side of her diaper and completely soaked her leg.
I asked some nice ladies to watch our stuff, and I ran Lila into the bathroom. Johnny had taken the diaper bag and the stroller, so I literally had nothing to cover Lila's butt with. I stripped her down and held her as covered as a could and waited at the entrance of the bathroom in order to flag Johnny down. He showed up pretty quickly and handed off a new Pull-Up. Unfortunately, all of Lila's clothes were in a checked bag getting rained on outside (Fast-forward: I'm OCD about packing and put all of the girls clothes in labeled Ziploc gallon bags, so even though their suitcase was COMPLETELY soaked, all of their clothes were dry. Take that Southwest...and the hurricane.), so Lila had no clothes. Johnny then went on another walk around the airport with the new mission of finding child pants.
Meanwhile, Lila ran around the airport in just a Pull-Up.
After about 30 minutes, Johnny finally returned with the only child pants in the entire airport.
"Crabby in the Morning"
Though happy with our new pants, our happiness was soon dashed when we realized that our flight was being pushed back to 10:30 and then 11:00. We continued to hang out at our gate which was conveniently located by one of the airport bars. This location provided interesting companionship in the form of old people who had had too much to drink. Remember the old couple from dinner? Well that man sauntered over from his Bud Light at one point to check on Olive and actually kissed her on the head. Now I'm not overprotective of my kids with strangers, but I think that might have been a step too far. There was also an older woman who insisted on holding Olive for a few minutes while regaling Johnny with tales of her bad back and bronchitis.
By 10:00, we had one diaper left between the two girls, Olive still hadn't slept, and I was entertaining Lila by walking up one moving walkway and back on the other one ("Tick tock it's yike a clock Mama!"). It was at this point we realized that if we had rented a car at 4:30 we would have been in Raleigh already.
We FINALLY got on the plane at 11:00 and took off around 11:30. Both girls slept on the short flight, thankfully, and I was patting myself on the back for surviving a harrowing layover without a single meltdown, Lila or Mommy. As we landed and I was pridefully unclipping my little angel from her carseat, Lila totally lost it. I mean went bananas. It was almost one in the morning, and she was completely hysterical. She sobbed from the airplane to the baggage claim to the car, "I don't want to get in dat white car! No fank you! No fank you!", to Grammie and Grampie's house. It was almost two in the morning by the time I got her in her bed. At this point Johnny and I are whisper yelling at each other about where the other one put the diaper bag and so on.
Long story short: we survived. So if you ever have a two year old and a baby on a flight that connects in Baltimore, I suggest you bring an extra pair of pants.
No comments:
Post a Comment