Two Babies and an Hour Delay

How was everyone's weekend? The boy and I actually spent a long weekend out in San Diego. We flew out Thursday and flew back to Louisiana yesterday. Overall, it wound up being a fun weekend. The boy had somewhat of a conference to go to, and it worked out since I got to spend most of the time with my family. A longer post will be up tomorrow about the trip, but I don't quite have the energy right now. Why is that? Well read on.

We had to fly to San Diego, but unfortunately there isn't an easy way to make that flight from Louisiana. The flight out we had to fly from New Orleans to Houston, from Houston to LAX, and from LAX to San Diego. Kind of a pain, but it wound up being a pretty low stress day of flying.

Our flight back to Louisiana yesterday, we only had one layover. First we flew from San Diego to LAX, then LAX to New Orleans. So it should have at least a little easier.

The flight to LAX was short, but again uneventful. After picking up food at the LAX (McDonald's for him, LaBrea Bakery Chicken Salad Sandwich for me) we made our way to the gate. Our flight was delayed 20 minutes for operations. Let me rephrase that, our flight that was supposed to get in at midnight Sunday night/Monday morning was delayed 20 minutes for operations. We were a little worried when we saw that. I mean what does "operations" stand for? Do they have to operate on the plane? Luckily, after not too long someone from the airline explained it. Delay due to operations meant that there was no one to operate the plane. It seems that the pilots were flying to LAX from San Francisco, and their flight had been delayed.

They did wind up boarding us, probably around the time our flight was originally scheduled to take off. We were all boarded and ready to go, except there were still no pilots. Finally, the flight attendants told us to look out the left side of our plane where a plane there that had just landed. Our pilots were on that flight. As soon as the pilots could switch planes and went after they completed their 20 minute pre-flight checklist we would be on our way.

Finally an hour after our original departure time, we were off and in the air. It should have been smooth sailing from there. I would sleep as I had done on ALL of our flights previously, and wake up some-what well rested in New Orleans. Except there were 4 babies on the flight. One sat in the row in front of me. One sat in the row across from me. And the last two siblings sat on the other side of the aisle, two rows behind me. The two babies closer to me both fell asleep soon after take-off and were almost silent the entire flight. But the other two? Not so much. They started screaming as soon as we were in the air and continued the entire time. Seriously, they were still crying after the plane landed while we were deboarding.

If I'm being honest, the two did not cry constantly, but at least one of the two was almost always crying. It was mainly the younger one who was crying, but every once in a while the older would join in and they'd cry in unison. You had to at least feel a little sorry for the parents. The mom would take one baby and walk the aisle trying to get it to stop crying. Then the other one would start and she'd trade babies with dad. I'm normally pretty good about sleeping on planes, but I didn't sleep a wink this flight. I'm sure part of it was due to how badly I knew I would need the sleep come Monday afternoon. But 3 straight hours of crying didn't quite help the situation.

We finally did land around 1am. Which meant after getting off the plane, getting our bags, and driving from New Orleans we were at the house around 2. Which means I'm currently functioning on just about 4 hours of sleep.

I'm going to try to stay up for The Bachelor tonight, hopefully I make it through. A much more positive post about the trip should be here tomorrow!

~Shoshanah