No deep thoughts today. It's almost packin' time.
Assuming the Iceland volcano doesn't decide to mess up our travel plans, we'll be on the plane in three days, headed to Chicago. Usually we stop over somewhere in Europe. That would have been bad for this trip. Luckily this time it's straight to Toronto, then O'Hare. So, we have a decent chance of getting there.
We've got our "Buy in Amrika" list made out. Mac & cheese, Dry Idea, the girls' favorite bath paints. I used to "like" Target. Now it's a pilgrimage site.
The post-it notes are also written, so the critical stuff doesn't get left behind--passports, immunization records, flight info, stroller.
We've certainly spent a lot of time whining about these trips over the past 3-1/2 years and approximately 150,000 miles. No doubt, going trans-Atlantic with small kids isn't anyone's idea of enjoyable. We've done the infant-won't-stop-screaming thing, the projectile-puking-infant thing, the we-can't-find-your-daughter's-reservation thing, the terrified-of-airplane-lavatories thing and the subsequent wet-seat thing. Kids jet-lagged for days or weeks, in both directions. It's all a barrel of fun.
We've made deals with the devil over kids sleeping on airplanes, which usually (as most deals with Satan do) backfire. You arrive bone-tired, finally all go to sleep for the first time in 36 hours, and 3 hours later, after your offspring have had refreshing naps, it's play time!
So, we try really hard not to think about these trips until the last possible second. There's no point. Que sera, sera.
Actually there's an exception to this rule, which is planning the Activity Bag. It reminds me of a class assignment I had once, to take a pepper can and fit into it everything you'd need to survive in the desert for several days. It requires a careful cost-benefit analysis of an object's relative value versus its size, collapsibility, and weight. Same idea.
The bag used to be a knapsack crammed with toys and books. Now, every trip, it gets smaller. It's not that they won't play with all the stuff you bring. They'll play with some of it for 10 minutes, most things for 10 seconds, then will spend an hour and a half carefully and deliberately shredding your InFlight magazine or playing with a plastic straw.
So you might as well save your back and bring less. You (and by "you" I mean your husband) still have to carry enough other crap. Even though you swore you wouldn't become the people who carry a lot of crap. Either you carry it, or somebody starves or screams or wears vomit-scented clothes for 20 hours.
I'll spare you the diatribe on airport security, except to say that we watched "Up in the Air" and laughed. I mean, I love George Clooney. (Who doesn't want to watch him do anything, including go through a TSA scanner?) But is it really all that impressive to watch a grown man snap his luggage open and closed and put his baggie of liquids on the moving belt when no one is hanging on his leg, crying for juice, while he simultaneously takes off two other people's shoes (who hate having their shoes taken off), collapses a stroller and convinces a toddler who slept 4 hours last night to be held by a stranger wearing rubber gloves?
Like I said, we whine a lot. It's not like we planned to have families on two continents. Well, OK, actually, we did sort of choose to marry each other. That was an excellent decision on a human level and a lousy one, logistically. But no take-backsies. So I guess I'll go pack. It totally beats going by covered wagon.
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