By 8pm we were mostly packed, my husband made me one too many margaritas, and we all crashed. 1:30am on D-Day, Charlie cries to eat. I feed him and pump and my brain so kicks into gear, I never go back to sleep. The alarm was to go off at 4:30am anyway. Finally after lying there thinking about all the needs to get accomplished that day I surrender and just get up and get in the shower. Reshuffle a few more things, pick up the house a bit, my mom gets up, Jon gets up. We need to leave for the airport at 6am. We wake the kids up last and throw their clothes on (not an easy task with Sam who wakes up very grouchy) and put them in the already loaded car. We had to take two cars to the airport because with seven of us flying and the eleven bags (again, four of which were carseats), but then stroller and such as well, plus extra drivers to take our cars home from airport, we didn’t fit in just our suburban. We swing by Jon’s folks, grab them, make it to the airport before 7am.
As we are pulling up to PDX, I grab my husband’s shoulder and say, “please Lord give us ample amounts of patience today and help us remember we are a team—we are for one another. And help us remember we love our children.”
All I can say is check-in curbside is a BEAUTIFUL THING!!! Best $20 we spent (probably should have tipped better but whatever). Got all of the carseats dislodged from the suburban and bagged. We had five bags of luggage (yes, I only had five bags for six of us—pretty great, eh, for traveling with small people). My mom had two bags, although I do admit she had many diapers in her bags, and they were not for her. I somehow had the foresight to see that writing my address on 15 of those little airport bag tags would be incredibly obnoxious while trying to patrol our children, so I printed up a sheet of labels with our info on them so we could just stick them on all our bags. Jon congratulated me: “Genius babe.” I am gonna write that one down and totally utilize again. So if you can believe it within ten minutes, we were all checked in and off to security. Miracle.
Because we are such an entourage, they have a special check-in line for people like us I guess. It’s probably the handicapped area, but as probably politically incorrect as it is to say, we feel like definitely fit in that category. My mom’s pushing the double-stroller, Alice locked down on one side, the other side inhabited by my breast pump (which I had to take as one of my carry-ons…annoying), my mom has her camera bag/snack bag, diaper bag also hanging off the stroller, Jon has a baby, I have a baby, and Sam is in charge of his rolling Lightning McQueen suitcase. He thought he was so cool and if I could have found my camera I would have taken a picture because he was so cute.
I knew security would be excruciating but honestly, the people at the Portland airport were so gracious and helpful to us, it was so refreshing. Another miracle. It did help that we have twins. People love to stop and gawk at twins so they were actually pretty lenient with us and just let us go through with babies. Didn’t make us take our sweatshirts off, didn’t make kids take their shoes off, didn’t even attempt to fold up our giant stroller to send through the X-ray, and didn’t even wand the breast milk. I think the airport staff just looked at us and felt sorry for us so they we’re abundantly gracious with us. If you can believe it, we were done with security within the second ten minutes stretch of being at airport. So twenty minutes in, we are through the two most annoying parts of the airport. Seriously, God was seriously smiling on us.
We of course got there two hours before we were supposed to leave but that wasn’t a bad thing. Kids had ample time to run around and play and be loud in the airport. We got to eat, make sure everyone’s gone to the bathroom, and I had time to pump (I knew I wouldn’t be able to easily do that on the plane ride in tight quarters while likely holding a baby and entertaining a preschooler). We only lost Alice once and it was only for about two minutes. Pretty good.
We got to board first and SW is, for better or worse, first come, first serve seating. In our case, this is a plus. For everyone after us, maybe not so good. I could tell people were eyeing us thinking, “God, please give me a seat away from that family.”
