On the corner of Exhausted Children & Travel Delays

It was the end of a fabulous vacation. 

We were tan, happy & exhausted as our plane slowly backed up & started pulling onto the runway.

The Hubs looked over at me and gave me his sweet I-love-you-I-love-us smile. I gave him a happy, sleepy I-love-you-I-love-us-too smile in return. 

We both looked down at our sweet girls, semi-comatose. H-Berry was limp against me, snuggled up with her babies & blankie; poised and ready for a nice, long post-Disney nap. Little O had her head on the Hubs’ leg and her feet tucked under my leg, sprawled out over our three airplane seats with her lovey and blankie.

All was good. It was naptime. I smiled again as my eyes started to droop. Hopefully when we all woke up, we’d be landing at our airport back home.

And then.

“Folks? This is your captain speaking. We’re getting a notice here that we need to return to the gate. Just sit tight while we figure this out, and hopefully we’ll be taking off in no time.”

My eyes flew open. I shot a look at the Hubs, whose face was a mirror of the only thought running through my head:

No, please no. They were almost asleep.

“Mommy? Daddy? Are we up in the air yet?” Little O asked sleepily.

“Not yet, shhh,” I whispered. “Just try to rest, sweetie.”

She sat up. Of course.

“Why aren’t we moving anymore? Where are we going? Why aren’t we in the sky with the clouds?”

Her voice got increasingly louder with each question. Roused by her sister’s voice, H-Berry sat straight up and looked at me for answers too.

I shot the Hubs a helpless look.

“Who wants to read a book?” we said in unison.

Fifty-five minutes later~ after we had read seventy-five books to our increasingly hyper children AND visited the airplane restroom to take care of an H-Berry stink bomb diaper {great timing, H!}~ it was finally announced that they couldn’t fix the plane. Time to deplane & head back into the airport.

After gathering up our mountains of carry-on bags & carrying our crazy cracked-out children off the plane, we staked out a spot in the airport & tried to regroup.

“Dinner,” I said desperately to the Hubs. “Let’s feed them dinner, maybe they’ll pass out for the night when we finally get back on the plane.”

Ha. Hahahahahahaha.

Such sweet, naive words spoken from an exhausted momma. Of course my handsome husband agreed. What else could we hope for?

We fed them dinner, played 100 rounds of Go Fish, let them dance around for Grammy & Grampy, and didn’t bother to stop Little O from informing complete strangers about how she dunked her entire foot into the airport toilet earlier that day.

Two hours later, we were finally back on a new plane. Our children had passed the Slap-Happy Cracked-Out phase and made a sharp right-turn into Insanely Exhausted and Extremely Cranky phase. They both were crying before we even took off for our 2 hour flight.

We soothed them. We hugged them. We kissed them. We tried to snuggle them up with the blankies & lovies & encourage them to just close your eyes, we’ll be home soon.

We were met with more screams.

We know you’re tired, we said kindly. Let’s just try to rest & relax.

Louder screams. And we were only 15 minutes into a 2-hour flight.

A nice lady across the aisle from us took pity on us~ and our surrounding passengers~ and handed us a DVD player with Toy Story 2 fired up. Yes, friends, that’s how badly our children were behaving~ a total stranger was trying to make the situation better. Bearable. At least quieter.

It worked for about forty-five minutes.

And then? All bets were off.

The last hour of the plane ride was full of miserably loud, soul-crushing cries from our two exhausted children. They refused to be calmed down. They egged each other on with their sobs. They pushed away anything we put in front of them~ coloring books, crayons, reading books, cards, toys.

All of my carefully thought-out airplane activities? Apparently all for naught when your extremely overtired children hit the wall & the wheels fall off.

The Hubs & I had no choice but to hold on tight & ride it out, apologizing profusely to everyone around us.

And our kind, soft words from the beginning of the flight? We left those behind in Florida. Along with our pride. And any desire to ever fly with our children again.

When we finally landed at our home airport after 9pm, the girls had been awake for more than 14 hours. We let everyone off the plane in front of us, throwing I’m so sorry‘s out right & left.

As we finally staggered out to the terminal with two red-faced, runny-nosed, beyond-exhausted children, we promised each other that our next flight would be calm & relaxing & wonderful. It has to be, since we fully intend on using the vouchers we were issued for our plane trouble that day & redeeming them for two round-trip flights to somewhere exotic & warm & overtired-child free.

We love our children. We adore our children. We had the best Disney vacation ever with our children.

But we will not be flying anytime soon again with our children. It’s better that way. Trust us.

Counting My Kisses: I’m so thankful that we got home safely after an amazingly wonderful vacation~ even though the delays totally turned our world upside down, it still wasn’t enough to dampen our post-Disney glow {at least once we were finally off the plane. Lol.}. Little O & H-Berry fell asleep immediately on the drive home from the airport, and once our ears re-adjusted to the blissful quiet, the Hubs & I vowed to laugh about the plane ride & not let it affect our fabulous trip. But we’re serious about not flying with the kiddos anytime soon~ the next trip will definitely be just the two of us!

Do you have a travel horror story you’d like to share? I’d love to hear it!

Have a great weekend!

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