Norway Part 1: A Series of Unfortunate Events

Ever seen that movie or read the book(s)?

Our trip wasn't that bad, but it was pretty eventful.

Here's what happened-

1.  Houston traffic was somehow worse than usual so we arrived at the airport much later than anticipated.  In an effort to save time, Preb dropped me off with Liam and all the luggage and went to park in the deck (the place you usually park when you are picking someone up from the airport) -the one that costs like 2 dollars an hour.  It was his intention to go back later and go park the car in a cheaper lot once we got all checked in.

2. While checking in, Liam apparently wasn't registered to travel in their system. This is necessary when traveling abroad with a child.  After some arguing with Continental lady, (let's call her Barbie), and showing her our itinerary we printed from home with Liam's name on it, she found the info she needed but had to print out new boarding passes for all four of us.
This took quite some time and we realized that Preben was not going to have enough time to go back to the car to park it in the cheaper lot and shuttle back to the airport. 

Since he was planning on taking Noah to park the car and shuttle back, (so I wouldn't be alone with both kids), he left Noah's car seat in the car, which we needed for our trip.  He ended up having to leave me with both kids anyway, and ran back to the car to fetch the seat and now we are paying an excessive amount of money to the airport parking garage.

our carry-on

3.  When making it to the passport/ticket checking man after standing in the security line, (let's call him Ken for fun), he told us there was no boarding pass for me.  Silly Barbie forgot to print out my pass.

Keep in mind we have 2 kids under two, one who has to be held at all times and goes from laughing to screaming in about 11 seconds when he needs food, and one who does that terrible back arching/screaming thing when forced to be in a stroller for a long period of time without a nap or lunch.

Have you ever seen that family whose kids are crying, or screaming and the mother is just sort of staring off into space and not really acting like she notices the kids are even alive and you are thinking, 'some people just really should not be having children.'  yeah, that was us.  We were that family.

Anyway, poor Preben had to go BACK to the check in counter and re-wait in the line to get my boarding ticket printed -with no choice to but to leave me with the kiddos again. 

At this point, we were concerned about making it to our flight in time.

4. We finally made it to the security scan and we quickly put all our belongings the belt to screen them in the X-ray machine, and  we watched the car seat that preben went all the way back to the car to get, move down the belt and would you believe that our car seat got STUCK in the machine.  Yeah.  I know.

5.  It was about this time that I started to smell the familiar diaper aroma coming from Liam and noticed that he managed to have an explosive diaper and poop through his clothes.  Perfect timing.  We were not even past security, and we had already been at the airport for at least 2 hours and Liam was already pooping through his clothes.  I quickly ran to the bathroom to change him, leaving Preben with all our luggage and a screaming Noah who was yelling for me to come back (which I'm pretty sure was echoing through the whole airport) while the security people were working to free our carseat.

Here are the workers struggling to get the seat out.  Preben told me not to take a picture from the other side because he didn't want them to think I was making fun of them.  He's so thoughtful.

After about 40 minutes, they realized the seat was not coming out, and told us to go ahead to the gate, and they would bring the seat to us once they removed it - but not before asking us if they could remove the bottom of the seat.  I mean, what are you gonna say?  so we said fine, and they drove us in one of those little airport jeeps to the gate. 

(I highly recommend doing this if you have kids- even if your car seat isn't stuck in the X-ray scanner)   

Preben and Noah in the airport jeep.

We made it to the gate and were relieved that our flight was about an hour delayed.  Phew!  They brought the seat to us a while later, with just a dent in the bottom of it.  They told us they ended up having to take the whole top of the x-ray machine off.  (haha).

Noah in his seat at the gate blowing his nose.

6.  Well, it turns out the flight kept getting delayed by 30 minutes, and then 30 minutes more, and 30 minutes after that, and so on and so on.  After a while we realized we would have had enough time to park in that cheaper parking lot and still make our flight with time to spare.

I ended up using all my emergency items (new books, new puzzle, new markers, new coloring book, goldfish crackers, and M&Ms)  before we even left Houston.

7.  We ended up being about 6 hours delayed in Houston due to weather in NY, and when we were finally boarding, we realized that when Barbie re-printed our boarding passes, she somehow changed our seats and spread us throughout the whole plane, with Noah sitting alone. We told the lady who was scanning the tickets and was obviously annoyed, said, 'I really wish you would have told me this before', like it was our fault or something.  Some nice passengers ended up shifting around for us so we could all sit together.

8. It was night time once we made it to NY. We were supposed to arrive at 2:00.  Notice how Noah is not wearing his shoes. We lost them somewhere along the way.  It's always awesome to arrive shoeless in Norway with snowy weather and below freezing temps.

9. I was excited to see that each seat had their own screen since we had exhausted all our emergency resources for Noah at the Houston airport. How perfect if he could watch Toy Story 3 or something?

See the dark area near the bottom of the picture? This is where we were sitting and as luck would have it, our TVs were out of order.

10.  Once we arrived in NY, we knew we had missed our flight to Europe. 

We went to the check-in counter to find a new flight and we just laughed when we saw the sign on the desk say, "CLOSED, Open tomorrow at 2 pm."

Typical.

And this is what you look like when traveling with 2 kids and hitting the 24 hour mark.

God is good, and we ended up on another flight with another airline, and we did arrive safe and sound in Norway!

It was an adventure and the moral of the story is, if you are traveling with a baby, ALWAYS bring a change of clothes for them.