Don't ever fly Continental.

Have you ever been sitting on a plane, ages past boarding, and you’re waiting for the thing to actually move, and then suddenly someone bursts onto the plane looking disheveled and anxious, and you think smugly to yourself that these people should really plan better so that they don’t show up at the airport so close to their departure time?

Yeah. Welcome to our world yesterday.

Let’s put everything into perspective, though, and start on Saturday. We met my parents and niece for lunch, and then we brought my niece with us to the hotel near the airport, where we were spending the night. Both the girls fell asleep in the car on the way there. When they woke up at the hotel, Evie’s eyes were gunked up. YAY PINK EYE. We’re two hours from her doctor with an international flight going out the next day. I asked at the desk and found an Urgent Care center nearby, so we took off to the doctor. It was easily confirmed as pink eye—this is our first parenting experience with pink eye. It is not fun. So we pick up her medicine and drive around in circles for an hour looking for somewhere to eat. I finally gave up and picked the closest McDonald’s on the GPS. We drove for ten minutes and guess where it led us? To the ValuPark lot at the airport. Yes, the GPS was sending us INTO THE AIRPORT FOR DINNER. No thank you. That was really just a sidenote though because we finally ate and made it back to the hotel and the freezing ”heated” pool, where fun was had by all. When we get back, I am going to look into swimming lessons for Evie. She loved it.

After a restless night’s sleep, we get up and get our stuff ready to go. (This includes twenty minutes of trying to get Evie’s matted and puffy swollen eyes open and then medicated. Is this a good time to apologize to the flying peoples of the world for bringing pink eye onto a plane” Yeah, sorry about that.) We get to the airport, check in with minimal problems—although we did have go to through the security line twice because when we got up there, we found an issue with our boarding passes. Evie is grumpy, and none of us can blame her because HELLO, PINK EYE. We go through security, where I beep like mad. I was carrying all four passports and presumably they have a metal strip in them… according to the security people but I beeped several times later on so I have no idea.

After security, we have a couple of hours to kill and then I remember lunch. There’s only one place past security to eat in our general vicinity, so Whitley and I stood in line for 35 minutes. (Incidentally: after those 35 minutes, I waited an additional five minutes and then paid 22 bucks for two paninis, two bags of chips, two drinks, a one dollar orange that Evie wouldn’t touch after all and a bottle of milk. Whitley got a bottle of juice and a club sandwich for twelve, so I guess I can’t complain in comparison. The food sucked, too.) When we got back to the place, it was time to board.. or it would have been time to board if our flight wasn’t delayed. We had a few tense moments with thinking we were only going to have forty minutes to make it to our next flight, but eventually, a really nice gate agent really helped us. We decided to go to Newark and he put us in as backup on a flight that went out the next day. He even drew the route on a map of the Newark airport and told us how to get to the C terminal from A. We left before originally scheduled, so we had an hour and twenty minutes before the flight departed. We were GOLDEN.

HAHAHA. That is when this story takes a turn for the AWFUL. We get there and we are still rushing like mad because it’s a big place and we want to get to where we need to go as soon as possible, just in case. We ride the shuttle, we walk aaalllll the way through the C terminal to the gate, where we….. are told that we need to be in Terminal B. We’re not on that flight. We have 45 minutes at this point. M is pissed because he knew we wouldn’t have time to make it because of a Continental employee’s directions. The woman directs us to the Continental Customer Service, where we had to wait in line again. There, the woman ridiculed us for waiting at line (at yet another Continental employee’s direction) and basically just told us to run, knowing full well we wouldn’t make it. Yet, we had to try, so we ran. I mean, RAN. Two adults, one teen and one carried three-year-old, running like mad through a crowded airport. We get to the shuttle and we ride to the next terminal and can’t find the gate on the signs, so my brilliant husband heads to the SAS check-in counter. We were second-guessing that decision at the time, thinking that we might be killing precious minutes, but it was the only thing that saved us. They started messing with boarding passes and passports and affixed a beautiful green dot on our boarding passes that let us go through priority security lines, called the gate to let them know, and told us basically to run. I sent M on ahead at first, but we got back together at security, where we got to skip the mile-long lines. Then there was more running, still with the carry-ons and the Evie being carried. (We all took a turn, with M doing most of the worst of it, Whitley taking over in the middle and me finishing up. She weighs 40 pounds, by the way, and we stupidly decided against the mei tai, even though I was going to bring it for just this very sort of thing.)

And… we made it. After Security, M ran on the last few minutes to the gate—yes, the farthest one in the terminal--by himself, while we were struggling with the girl and the stuff, so that he could alert them that we were there.

WE MADE IT.

We burst onto the plane with everyone staring. We were red-faced, hot, sweaty, exhausted and really just operating in a state of shock, but we made it. Our reserved seats were apparently reassigned, but since there were two together for Evie and someone, and then someone behind that seat, we didn’t say a word about it. I got to sit in a window seat on the other side of the plane in the aisle behind them by myself, so M got to do baby duty for the entire flight. She was pretty good, he said, and she managed to sleep three and a half hours. The rest of us… not so much. But we made it, and that is all that matters.

I’m finishing this up at two in the morning (eight EST) because we woke up in the middle of the night with Evie, who woke up confused, and neither of us could go back to sleep because our bodies were thinking it was time to be awake. I think it’s time to go give it another try, though, because I have a feeling we’ll be up with her again pretty early.

We’re here… by the skin of our teeth. :)

(p.s. going to try to double-post while I'm gone.. sorry if it bothers you if you have the feed.)