Our flight

I am happy to tell you that we made it to Ukraine in one piece. The kids love spending their time with their grandma and grandpa and their uncle Vanya, and it is nice to have extra help with the kids. Although I am way behind on my sleep, I already feel refreshed and rested.

So here is the story of our trip. First of all, I lost my keys (maybe I packed them?) and we spent much of the Sunday searching for them to no avail. I hope we come back to our apartment with all of our stuff still in it. As usual, packing came down to the wire. Ashleigh was able to come and help us out with the kids while we finished and also drove us to the airport (THANKS!!!). At check-in, we were informed that our seating assignment had changed, even though we had called to make sure we were sitting together. There was some conflict with the row that has a bassinet holder, so in the process of fixing that, they decided that we could all sit separate from one another. They put a random person between me and Andre, and Jeff was sitting several rows away. Lucky for us, the only way to solve the problem was an upgrade to business class, which I have to say was awesome and really helped us manage the kids. On that note, I am glad I prepared for the worst, since the flight wasn't all that easy. Harper was napless when we got on our plane at 3 pm, so he was exhausted as it was and I really thought he was going to be zonked soon after take off...not so...all the new gadgets and sound made him as wide awake as he could be. After a few hours of him being crazy and trying to climb, touch and walk everywhere, I decided it was time to Benadryl him. I tried it a week ago at home and it worked. However the plane case was quite the opposite, and Harper only fell asleep some 6 hours into the flight, only to wake up 2 hours later! (the little bassinet was a sardine can for our bulging boy, and he just could'nt turn around in it). Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep, and it has been difficult to adjust for all of us.


Here's a juicy sidenote--skip this paragraph if you don't like soap opera type gossip. There was a couple in their early 40s across the isle from me - rich and good looking. He was a bit annoyed with having two kids in business class sitting across the isle from me (which annoyed me). Anyway - fast forward, the guy falls asleep about 3 hours into the flight, and she is up. Since I was up with Harper, we struck up a conversation for some time, and she told me the she felt for me since she has 3 kids of her own and also mentioned that her husband/boyfriend (not sure which) also had 3 kids (all of them under 8). As I was standing with Harper in the bathroom/flight attendant area for a while, I kept noticing she was coming back for more and more wine. After downing probably a whole bottle, she started to talk with some guy in his 20s and eventually they started making out. Then she sat down and pretended to be asleep, while the guy kept waiting for her by the wine and kept walking back and forth past her. It was funny, but more sad--made me think about how living a life that is of the world can cause pain regret, and that the word of wisdom is tied to being faithful in other things.

The second flight was rather uneventful, and all of us fell asleep at some point. We arrived to Kiev to find that our stroller was lost, so that took a good hour of standing in line to file the claim, etc. but we got it back today, which will make our walks much easier.

We are still jetlagged and slept most afternoon yesterday, today we have fun plans of going downtown (Just Jeff and I - radical!) and the watching ballet at night. We have eventful days to come and not enough of Jeff's time to do everything we want.