The Plane Ride

Well, it is time to write about the plane ride.  When we left California everything went great. My mom was able to get a special pass to help me get to the gate with the kids and it was really easy.  once at the gate everyone started getting a bit restless, so I was getting nervous.  At the gate I went to check and make sure our seats were all together and the flight attendant put an extra seat in the middle of us, so that we ended up with five seats!  This was great news! I figured due to lack of sleep that the kids would be exhausted and sleep the whole way, but after about 45 minutes I knew that was not going to happen and had tried every activity book my mom had packed for the kids.  Now they were fighting sleep and the poor stewardesses were trying to help but I caved and decided to rent the portable DVD players.  To my surprise they don't take cash so I have to ask a stranger if I pay them cash, if we can swipe his card to purchase the quieting devices for my children.  Finally, settled for a few minutes.  Next, comes dinner which to our surprise is pasta salad that none of my children will eat and there are no other options.  Oh, except the food I can buy but I am out of cash and have no cards because Ryan has them all in Hawaii.  So, we just deal with pretzels for dinner.  We actually make it through two movies okay and then Taft cries for about an hour and everyone crashes.  Well, I now take the great sigh of relief but only to hear the captain that we will be landing in about 40 minutes.  Everyone but Taft stayed asleep and once he woke up everyone was cracking up because he was talking really loud about animals and kids and just about everything random you can think of.  We finally landed and I was able to call Ryan and tell him about the gate pass, so he was at the gate waiting but could not come on the plane.  The flight attendants were nice enough to try and help figure out how to get two extremely passed out children off the plane while holding three huge carry ons and a baby.  So, I took Taft off first to Ryan and then came back for Alissa and the flight attendant had Kenzie in his arms and the other attendant had all of my bags.  We managed to get off just in time for them to clean them plane.  I was so relieved to be off of the plane and see Ryan there waiting for us!