Arrival

No, not the ABBA album of the same name, but our arrival here in Germany. We left Boston Wednesday night with Swiss International Airlines and in just under 11 hours, we flew to Zuerich, changed planes and hopped over to Hamburg. As usual the weather was gray and rainy. I forgot the very fine and steady mist that get's you wet much faster than you would think - I love it, it is very relaxing.

Traveling with children is definitely easier when they are older compared to traveling with infants and toddlers. But this would have been the flight for families, there were actually more children than adults, the captain was there to greet us when we boarded and he remarked that he had never, ever had this many children on board. It is still not easy though to take my kids on an overnight trip, one is so highstrung and pouty and sees the worst possible scenario in everything and freaks out easily over nothing and the other one does not deal well with anything outside of routine and familarity - flying kind of does not fit into that scheme - and as a result cannot regulate things like volume of voice or her body in physical space. I admit that partly the annoyance is my fault, I am just not laid back enough and I have no patience for a child that tells me 7 times in 3 minutes "I am thirsty!!!!", when the drink cart is already on the way.

I was relieved though that it was somebody else's kid that threw up this time. Strange enough, imagine that girl sat in the same seat that S. was sitting in 3 years ago, when she kept throwing up. Unfortunately my girls have both inherited the inability to actually get comfortable on the plane and subsequently sleep. So needless to say, we were extremely tired once we got here and S promptly fell asleep. Of course we want to stay within the German time and nobody was allowed to go to sleep before 8pm, resulting in us waking each other agian and again, to keep that schedule working.