Eight Miles High...



"...and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known."

Whew! Let me warn ya, this blog entry is a long one. We just came back from our first transcontinental flight (or any flight, really) with the girls. The flight out was not too bad. Candy and I had some debate about whether dealing with the stroller was a good idea or not. Boy was I wrong. The stroller was awesome, as they allowed us to roll right up to the gate and gate check it. This allowed us to haul even more stuff in addition to the babies. Another nice thing about taking the babies is that the airlines throw out virtually all of their carry-on rules (or at least stretch them quite a bit).

Two valuable travel tips for multiple baby travel:

1) Travel on low travel days (Tues-Thurs) and there will generally be plenty of extra room on board the planes. This gives the gate the freedom to clear out almost an entire row for your comfort. We basically had 5 seats to ourselves. On a low use flight this is easy to arrange, as the answer to "would you like to move away from potentially screaming babies?" is always yes.

2) IMPORTANT: There is a hidden rule that basically no two lap babies can be placed next to each other. While there appear to be some exceptions based on the type of plane, each section of seats normally has only ONE extra oxygen mask, so if the plane depressurizes two babies together would be in trouble. This means when making a reservation, you want to get seats across the aisle from each other (the best you can do). If the flight is full they will not be able to move you. See the bottom of this blog entry for more details on that horrible eventuality.



Left on a Thursday and flew into Dulles, which is officially the oddest major airport with its shuttle cars on stilts. That airport should have been updated two decades ago and they are only getting around to it now. Drove into Rockville, MD to stay with my BE-UTE-IFUL Aunt Margo (pictured here). The traffic at 5:30 onto the 495 Beltway was less beautiful, but we will not discuss such an ugly thing. Margo made us dinner and we visited with our friends Debbie and Tracy, who apparently live so close they are really neighbors of my Aunt and Uncle. We slept in a red, white, & blue themed bedroom, except, oddly enough, for the leopard-skin wallpaper on one wall. Where Yankee Doodle Dandy meets Tarzan the Ape Man.



On Friday we visited with my college buddy/roomie/lackey Dave G. Sadly, I appear to have no pictures of this. Maybe I took them and Dave sucked the silicon right off the RAM chip with his mind. He can do that. You should see what he does to Dodger baseball games. Friday night was the Rehearsal Dinner at my Uncle Ed's house. I got about as lost as possible trying to go from the Congressional Country Club, where I was staying (and this cute picture of Kayla was taken) as I have ever been. First of all, I blame Dave who has bad directions karma. Secondly, I blame myself for blindly following Google Map directions without THINKING about them first. We had swapped maps accidentally, so I was on my way to the wedding church site. Finally I blame the Potomac River, which stubbornly insisted on lying between me and my final destination. It took an extra hour to unravel that mess, and we missed some of the Rehearsal Dinner festivities. Rats.



Saturday morning we met up with Candy's Uncle Chuckie. Once again I have no photos, but we do have some video that I will not even pretend I will ever post on this site. If you want moving pictures I suggest your local cinemateque. Chuck is quite the baby expert, with four (if I have counted correctly) grandkids of his own. He appears to have developed the trick of tickling babies necks with the tip of his nose. Rylie (pictured here in her "Owned by Daddy" outfit)in particular seemed to like this.

The wedding itself was at Saint Patrick's down in the heart of Washington DC. It was here I finally got it through my thick skull that Google Map Directions and the like are very limited, as the poor signage in DC got me once again. Once off the directions I was [please cover your child's eyes and/or ears] SCREWED. If I had taken the five minutes to study a map of where I was going I could have saved myself, but instead we spiraled our way towards where we thought we needed to go to get back on the printed directions. We never did, as this part of DC is full of one way streets, streets that don't go through, and highways that won't let you off or on where you want. We also ran into a full-fledged street fair, which I felt just wasn't fair (second meaning, same spelling) at all. We did eventually arrive, only 15 minutes late, and then miraculously found on-street parking practically out front, which was clearly God's way of saying, "Oh, I really overdid it with the street festival closing off five city blocks, didn't I? My bad."



We missed the bridal processional, but otherwise saw the entire ceremony, which was the full Catholic wedding-fest, complete with liturgy, communion, and the whole shebang. Amazingly the girls slept through almost the entire thing. They stirred once, and I can only imagine what they were thinking, waking up inside a Gothic cathedral-style church, complete with stain glass windows and the rhythmic echoing chants of priest and congregation. We then went from the Church to the Reception (this time NOT getting lost), where the girls were a big hit. They seemed to be on there best behavior, snoozing through most of the dinner, pictured here where I parked them in front of a window at the CCC.



The wedding itself was a typical family affair, with a lot of drinking and dancing. It is not a party unless someone staggers into my room looking for a bathroom. The next day we nursed hangovers at a family brunch. We had competition for cutest baby from cousin Caroline (pictured with mommy Rachel), but I think once again the crown went to us, as it is difficult to stand up to the twin barrels of the K-Mac and RJ Outlaw show. Caroline did have us beat in the talent competion, where she managed to carry both a cinamon roll and a small bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream throughout the house, picking herself up when she fell by her head alone, as she refused to put down any of the treasures she had in hand.

It was great seeing everyone, but all good things must come to an end... and for us that end was the flight home. The flight was packed to the gills, but they had to move us from our booked seats because of the oxygen mask issue I mentioned above. They put us in the aisle and center seat, in the front row. This is nice because it has a little more leg room and bothers fewer people, but sucks because you have no place to store anything and with two babies you have lots of stuff you want easy access to. But that was only half the problem. AFTER they loaded everyone on the plane, they decided that there was still only one extra mask for the three central seats (the plane was a 767 with a 2-3-2 seat formation). This led to an immediate shuffle which left Candy in the middle seat and me diagnally behind her on the aisle. At this point seven people has been moved around and none of them were happy. Two of those highly grumpy people were Kayla and Rylie.

With their parents split, limited access to things to sooth them, a long ground delay, a milk supply issue (we had only 4 bottles for what was nearly a 10 hour stretch, if you don't include the two smaller Medela bottles, which I do not count because Kayla would only scream if you tried to feed her with one of those), multiple unfriendly diaper incidents, and a Captain with a love for the Fasten Seat Belt Sign, things got ugly real quickly. Even when the flight crew tried to help, they hurt. For instance one "nice" stewardess liked to help us by picking up our child and then running away to the opposite end of the plane and not returning the baby to us. I am talking more than 15 minutes. Twice we had to get up and take the baby back from her. Kayla didn't seem to mind, but the mother of the baby was definitely further stressed by it.

To summarize, the babies cried most of the trip home, so we were THOSE people on the plane. The ones that make everyone else miserable. It is very, very hard when the babies get cranky like that on a plane, because 90% of the things we do to soothe them get hard or can become impossible because of take-off, landings, and turbulence. By the time we got to LA, we looked like we had been riding on the outside of the plane the whole way. The trip was great, but I think I will not run and plane travel with twins again soon if I can help it. I have been told they only get worse to travel with until about 2-3 years old and won't be tolerable until roughly 4 years. Sounds like a goal. No one else get married for three and half years, or if you do, please do it within a one hour flight of Los Angeles.

To soothe all our frazzled nerves, please enjoy a picture of my two young-uns with two of my cousin Lorna's young-uns, the irrepressible Maggie and Colleen.