Next Time, I'm Staying With the Luggage

Moments before I even set foot outside the van at the airport, I knew I might be facing defeat. For boys don't wait patiently for adults to exit the vehicle before tearing past them. Perhaps it's the newness of it all, but they have basically gone through our first few days as if they're in the Indi 500, each vying for the #1 spot.

We all know the commercial airline experience moves at turtle speed, save the actual flight time. So these boys were pretty pissed...couldn’t understand why Mom and Dad would be such horrible people to make them wait.

I know what you’re thinking. But we embarked upon this journey well prepared...so we thought. I had a bag full of typical boy toys for each and a bag of various coloring/craft supplies for each. A bag of books, including several fun wipe-off kind and dry erase markers. Plus the emergency bag hidden in my carry-on loaded with sugary bribes, even though, for the record, that is against my parenting philosophy. Oh, and plenty of "night time" meds for their legitimate runny noses and coughs.

I was so naive.

I had to put the boys in Time Out before we even made it to the check-in line. While they had been running from us, T.O. wasn’t so much a form of discipline as a method to keep them in one place, plus keep me from running like the crazy mad woman I was. To clarify, they did know they were supposed to stay with us...not run away. So don't go thinking we're unfit. We're good people, whatever that means.

In the future, if we ever are insane enough to travel by air with more than one child, I am calling dibs on getting to stay with the luggage. Keith can have the privilege of chasing kiddos.

You get the picture. Every step of the way, the boys would attempt an escape, and we'd have to make them sit just to hopefully insure we all made it out of the country together.

The boys were of course sitting next to the wall in Time Out while Keith, who refused to let me help because I don't even know what the forms were and am incompetent with all important documents, filled out all 4 of the forms by himself. Sitting quickly turned to leaning, then sprawling, and finally swimming. All of this on the disgusting airport floor.

Now I am inexperienced with children wallowing in the dirt and grime of thousands of stranger's shoes. It's not just that Avery is merely aware that floors are dirty. She knows the varying degrees of floor dirtiness. While some floors are not clean enough for food, some are not clean enough for feet.

There is an entirely different set of floor cleanliness standards for boys. While I wouldn't have let Avery set a bare toe on that airport floor, I would have served the boys spaghetti directly on it. There wasn't an exposed inch of their bodies that didn't get some good contact time with that floor. And I was A-okay with it.