We made it!!!

On Saturday morning, we got the family up at 3:45 to make it to the Salt Lake Airport for a 6 a.m. flight. I flew by myself with our 4 kids to D.C. and I'm happy to say that we made it without incident (we even had to catch a connecting flight in Minneapolis and Luke came down with a fever the night before we left)!! Everyone that I talked to about my upcoming adventure with our 4 kids thought that I was crazy to attempt it. I also had many people at the airport and on the plane tell me that I was a brave person to attempt such a feat.

DH was able to get a gate pass at the Salt Lake Airport so that he could help accompany us through security and to the gate. Security is such a joke because we ALL had to take off our jackets AND shoes, walk through the metal detector, and then put everything back on again. (The temperature was only in the 40s when we left Salt Lake, so coming to the airport without jackets was not an option.)

I had everything planned out in advance to ensure that everyone would be able to manage their own things (each kid except Kitty carried their own backpack with their own snacks & activities for the plane). I took our stroller to gate-check it so that I could put Blondie in the seat and Kitty fits very nicely in the basket underneath. That way we would not have to worry about the 2 little ones getting separated and we could make it to our connecting flight in time.

Well, it turns out that Blondie did not want to ride in the stroller. She wanted to walk by herself and pull the child-size suitcase that we had brought to store extra diapers & clothes & our jackets in. This made for a little bit of an adventure in Minneapolis trying to get all the way from concourse G where we landed to concourse C where our connecting flight was located. And of course, the section of the airport that we were walking through did not have any walking sidewalks until we got to concourse C. We had many people pass us and smile and I could hear comments from people about how cute the kids were and how cute Blondie was as she is trying to pull this suitcase through the airport. Luckily we had plenty of time to get to our gate (we only had an hour layover, but our first flight arrived a few minutes early and we got off the plane rather quickly).


There were several people on both flights who made comments after the flight was over about how well behaved the kids were (and luckily we didn't have much screaming from Kitty who can throw some nice tantrums every now and then). In fact there were a couple of people on the last flight who were amazed to see that I had 4 kids with me - since they didn't hear much from them on the plane. Since we were occupying 4 seats, M&M had to sit across the aisle from the rest of us and she sat next to a very nice lady on the first flight who told me when the flight was almost over that she was very impressed with how prepared I was and with how many activities I had to occupy the kids' attention.

Needless to say that even though the kids were well-behaved for the most part (I could have done with a few less kicks to the seats in front of us), I was pretty tired by the time we got to D.C...