Let the bitching commence. Three days ago at 4:45 a.m., I stood before an airline counter with our four to-be-checked bags piled behind me and Nate already complaining loudly about his stroller straps beside me and stared blankly into the eyes of the less-than-sympathetic ticket agent.
"It's delayed two hours," she repeated as if that should make me understand. The alarm woke me at 3:00 a.m. and I'd been herding suitcases & children every since. The entire focus of my day was to reach this spot, give her my cumbersome baggage, rally for one last push through security and then sip a chai latte in stupefied silence. So, what now?
"It'll be tight in Denver then?"
"You can't make your flight in Denver, that's what I'm doing, I'm trying to reroute you."
I audibly gasped. "You can't hold it? You'd only have to hold it 30 minutes."
"No."
My heart sank. "We'll go home then? We can go on the same flight tomorrow?"
"No, I'm sorry," she told me. "Our flights are full tomorrow. We'll send you to Denver on this flight, put you up for the night and then I'm trying to get you on the United flight to Cancun tomorrow."
I try to keep a good attitude about traveling with children. You have to go with the flow. You have to consider everything part of the adventure. And, above all, you have to carry enough food to feed them whenever they feel slightly peckish for a month. My hormones must have been a bit off, or maybe it was just the 3:00 a.m. wake up and the hour we had already spent entertaining them in front of the ticket desk, but my eyes filled with tears. I knew she could see. I swallowed hard to find a sort of normal voice.
"Can we have two rooms?" I whispered. You may think this is a small point, but that is because you have never lain awake all night in a hotel room with a baby on your stomach, a three-year-old wedged perpendicularly between you and your husband, and a five-year-old girl whining in an irritating high-pitched whine that she can't sleep at intervals exactly timed to ensure that you are startled from a fitful doze each and every time. I have vowed on numerous nights of self-inflicted hotel torture never, ever to share a room or a bed with my children ever again. It is a matter of survival.
"Yes," she said, "you have five tickets, so two rooms shouldn't be a problem." My near psychotic break seemed to soften her a little.
She pecked at the computer for another fifteen minutes. The line behind us grew to give-up-go-home-and-call-the-airlines-yourself length. The children systematically destroyed those pull out line placement thingys and I could no longer summon the energy to stop them because we had been standing there for almost three hours. Security still stood between me and my chai.
Finally, she picked up the phone and conferred with someone in hushed tones. Another woman, perkier and cuter with a fresh looking ponytail and an authoritative stance, popped up behind the first. "You're going to have to step to the side," she told me. "I'm going to sort this out, but in the meantime she can help someone else." We stepped to the side and she disappeared, which is not, in general a good sign. My children wreaked havoc. I sat numbly.
When she came back, she had boarding passes! and hotel vouchers! and meal vouchers for an army! and tickets! To Dallas. Dallas? We'd have to fly to Dallas, she explained, and then Cancun, it was the only way.
We flew to Denver - where it was seven degrees - and got on a shuttle. Good thing we had left all of our coats and cold weather gear in the car. A move that absolutely made sense at 4:00 a.m. when we entered the airport expecting to re-emerge in Cancun, Mexico. It was butt ass cold is what I'm telling you and I know butt ass cold, I LIVE butt ass cold DAILY. I have no need to fly anywhere for butt ass cold. I'm truly over it, but be very, very grateful that you were not married to me on that shuttle in Denver. Kiss your wife and/or husband and tell them thank you for not being me. Seriously.
I could write seven paragraphs about how hideous it is to sleep in a hotel room with any combination of my children. It's like sleeping in a room with a thousand hamsters on those tiny wheels and they won't stop wheeling and wheeling, but you can't kill them because it's illegal. That sums it up.
Back at the Denver airport at 4:00 a.m., there was a second issue of two hour proportions at the ticket desk. This issue involved Nate as a lap baby and blah blah blah and we needed to pay taxes for him and they couldn't make it work and more time and more panic and more typing until finally they gave us our boarding passes to Dallas and told us that American Airlines could help us at the gate before our flight to Cancun left. While the traveler in me knew this was absolutely the worst plan ever in the history of plans, I had little choice and off we went to Dallas. Which was not where we wanted to go. And we had no boarding passes to anywhere else. BUT I WAS NOT THE LEAST BIT STRESSED OUT ABOUT THIS.
In Dallas, my-not-the-least-bit-stressed self stalked the Cancun boarding gate until a poor, unsuspecting American Airlines representative arrived and then I pounced. For the third time in less the twenty four hours - for the third time - an airline employee typed endlessly while staring at her screen. At long last, she handed me five boarding passes and my heart resumed a normal rhythm.
"Great!" I exclaimed. "Except - oh - none of these say infant, I need the baby added to mine."
"Baby?"
"Yes the baby. I have a lap baby."
"I've already issued five, you have five travelers total?"
"No six."
"Six?"
"Yes, six, five ticketed one lap baby."
"Oh. That's a problem."
????? OMIFREAKINGGOD. "Well, we have seats, right, so, the baby is just going to sit on one of us, so?"
"No. He needs a ticket, I can't let him on without a ticket for an international flight. Did you buy him a ticket?"
But, but, but. I bought me a ticket. And he's going to sit ON ME.
"I, well, the thing is, I wasn't on American originally, I was on Frontier and they booked these tickets when we missed our whole original itinerary."
"Ah. Well they didn't book a ticket for the baby on this flight."
"So may I book one now?" Because, you understand, it's a formality, he's going to sit on me.
"Not here, you have to go out."
"Out?" I knew, but I could not believe it. The flight departed in thirty minutes.
"Yes, out to ticketing. We can't issue a ticket here."
An imaginary ticket? You can't issue my imaginary ticket for my baby who is going to sit in the same space I will be occupying? Here?
"Out through security?"
She kept her face deadpan. "Yes."
And then I did something that I haven't done since I was nineteen and I could not get another speeding ticket and lose my license. I admit here, for my small world to read, that I did it 120% on purpose because it had worked the morning before and I was desperate. It was this or leave the baby in the Dallas airport because I WAS going to Mexico.
I burst into tears. "I have four kids with me. They're all under five. We will never make it. I know this is not your fault, but the Frontier people told me I could do this here. Please?"
She called her manager. I was completely aware of her misconception that I was traveling with the four small children alone and I did not correct her despite the fact that my lie of omission was going to be all to apparent when we boarded the plane. They were lovely and helpful and they did manage to procure Nate an imaginary ticket for my seat without sending me on a hopeless wild ticket chase that would guarantee that I would miss the plane on which I already had a seat that both Nate and I could sit in. Breathe in, breathe out.
We boarded. Matt and I weren't sitting together. Matt got Nate and I got all the other children, which ended up being a total win because Nate was an unmitigated pain in the ass and even from two rows away I kind of started to wish we'd left him in the Dallas airport. In my row, Quinn fell asleep between Saige and Garrett and they played quietly for the entire flight.
On arrival in Mexico, I somehow restrained myself from kissing the airport floor.
I'm glad we didn't leave him in Dallas. He's a keeper. Life is good. Have I mentioned that?
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