Kwan Family Adventures

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Texas in July!

Mommy's corner: This year, we decided to visit my family in Texas in July, again. We were actually hoping to visit during a non-summer month, because we enjoyed the weather so much better in December last year than the past July's we had visited. But, I guess it wasn't mean to be!

God bless Uncle Stephen, who helped me check in our luggage & literally got me all the way up to the security checkpoint. Beyond that, I was on my own with the 2 kids, double stroller, 2 carry-ons & 1 car seat. I bet we looked like a real traveling circus. I sort of thought that maybe someone would take pity on a mother traveling alone with 2 young children, but NOOOOOO, nobody offered any help the entire time.

I think it would our travel adventure would have worked out much easier if our flight had left ON TIME. Instead, it was delayed for an hour or two, and I had to do my best to feed the kids, entertain them & keep them contained at our terminal until it was time to board. Which leads me to the next part of my story....

While we were waiting, I told Nicole that we needed to change her diaper, but I had to strap Jason into the stroller first. Nicole gave me a HUGE scare because she disappeared during the time I was working on getting Jason buckled in. It's one of her "things" - avoidance of diaper changes. But still, I was close to FREAKING OUT when I realized that she was nowhere to be seen. In as calm of a manner as I could, I steadily & loudly called out to her, "NICOLE, you need to come here right now. NICOLE, Mommy needs you to come out where I can see you. NICOLE, where are you?" Blah blah blah blah blah. I don't even know what I said anymore. I did this for a couple minutes, trying to decide what to do, when I heard someone call out, "Is that her behind that pole?"

Sure enough, Nicole was hiding behind a very tall & very wide column, about 50 feet away, crouching close to the ground to avoid detection. Let me tell you, if every eye wasn't on me & her at that moment, I think I would have whooped her right then & there. Instead, I stayed as calm as I could & told her that she had lost all privileges to walk by herself & then I put a very bright, red harness on her. At that point, I did not care what anyone else thought of me, because I was NOT going to have her leave my side again.

Anyways, we finally made it onto the airplane. Thankfully, I was able to shove this lady out of her seat so that I could make use of the entire row for each of us. Look at Nicole - notice the bright red Elmo harness and, of course, the innocent-looking smile that says, "What did I do?"

Jason was a handful, as expected. Did I mention that he likes to climb? If I let him, he probably would have climbed over the chair into the next row & so on & so forth.

By the time we were able to get off the plane, the kids were absolutely stir crazy! Right now, they're booking it down the airplane aisle! As you can see, Nicole still has her harness on. But what you can't see is that Jason has one on, too...but his goes around his left wrist & Nicole was holding onto that, since I had to get the 2 carry-ons & the car seat.