Christmas Adventures

So now to tell the story of our Christmas travels and why I will probably never fly American Airlines again. Months ago we bought our tickets and several weeks later we received a notification of schedule change. Our 11am flight became a 5pm flight. Late for us but no problem. Now to the evening before our travels, I am printing boarding passes and I notice that out boarding time is 10:45am. Brian calls the airline and apparantly our original flight is back, I don't know why we did not receive another schedule change notification and yes I check my spam e-mail regularly to make sure that nothing important ends up in there by mistake. Frantic call to Miss J to take Alex to the vet in the am. At least I was completely packed at this point, I only had to prepare my diaper bag of snacks and lunch.

We head out in the morning for the earlier flight. We are driving south in pea soup fog. B is convinced it will burn off by the time we are ready to fly. We get to the airport with minimal trouble and head inside to drop off bags. We are greeted with a huge line at the AA desk. Their early flight to Chicago is cancelled and our flight to DFW is delayed. So we wait in line. While we wait here for almost an hour out flight was cancelled. No problem, upset but staying calm. We get to the front to see what we can do. We were automatically booked on a Sunday flight, but they split us up. B and Aidan early, Ainsley and I late and out of Ohare. Not happy now. Kids unhappy too, Aidan especially. B is watching the weather map in the airport lobby. Huge snow and ice front headed our way. We decide to head down to Chicago, fog is continuing and we decide to drive down to Tx and get out before the storm hits. A huge blessing here is that I had a bag packed full of snacks, lunches and activities. We stopped for drinks and a map and headed out on our way. Our parents were frantic the whole time but we had the easiest trip. The worst weather we had was the fog and when we hit the snow and ice front we were far enough south that it wasn't too bad. I am thankful that we left when we did because our flights on Sunday would not have made it out either. We made it to DFW before my flight would have left Ohare. Sad but true. We were refunded our money very readily by the airline which was also a blessing. The drive back was equally easy, we had good weather the whole way, but I was much more tired from not sleeping during most of our trip.

B seems to think that we could make this drive a regular thing when we head down to visit relatives and friends. We would be saving a ton of money that way, maybe we should invest in the mini-van.

Cute pictures above of the kids with my Mom making cookies, B and Aidan putting together one of the many Star Wars lego sets that he received and of Miss Ainsley being sassy and opening presents.