Traveling with Three!

So on this trip we had the usual diarrhea and urine leakages but we also had an epic breastfeeding fail. After breastfeeding for more than 6 years straight (except for most of two pregnancies) I thought I got this breastfeeding thing. Here I am using my English reserve to understate this: not exactly.

the baby in her traveling outfit

I normally feed the baby at 7:30 when we both wake up. The day we flew we had to be the airport at 7 for a 9 am flight. So when I woke up at 5:30, I fed the baby. Job done, right?

Wrong. At 7:30 just as we were halfway through security, my breastmilk let down. I was tiptoeing in socks as my shoes had been taken and folding my arms across my chest while security personnel said things like 'Is it okay if I check this bag/baby food...?' and 'Can I check this bag?' and I was like DO WHAT YOU WANT.

I had forgotten my breast pads. Note to self: passports are not the only important thing to pack - think passports and breast pads, the two P's in future!

Anyway by the time I got through security it was too late. My shirt was drenched.

On every trip for the last 7 years I have packed a spare shirt for myself and never needed it. So when I was packing for this trip I said to myself I never need a spare shirt so why pack something useless?

during a layover at the Newark airport

I ended up buying a shirt. At an expensive beyond-security-airport-shop. It was supposedly half price so I guess I should be thankful. It is also the nicest shirt I own. As it should be. The fabric for my wedding dress cost less. This shirt basically cost more than my wedding dress.

Anyway so after going wedding dress I mean shirt shopping, we hunkered down by the smaller but still existent soft play in the Edi airport. Why did they remove the good and bigger soft play?

The whole trip single people kept stomping by me muttering 'Ridiculous' and 'Can't believe this' under their breath and I felt like standing up and saying 'You don't have kids, you have NO IDEA what ridiculous and can't believe this mean!'

waiting for the shuttle in Newark - Primus and Secondus refused to wear coats; Tertius in the sling with scarf over her head

We were impressed with the Edinburgh-Newark flight. The difference between a 9 hour and 6 hour + flight is huge - it's those last 3 hours where everything really falls apart!

People in Newark airport were pretty nice. Not all of them but a lot! Compared to 0% of people being nice at the Atlanta airport, this was a nice change.

Our layover in Newark was due to be 7.5 hours. I figured we would just look for the breastfeeding room advertised on the Newark airport website and hunker down. But then we got rescheduled for a 8.5 hour layover and my husband wisely said 'Let's get a hotel.'

It was the best decision ever. On our way back we tried vainly to locate the breastfeeding room and got sent on a wild goose chase for an hour around the terminals and air trains that ended with finding a locked family bathroom.

But the hotel was great! We paid basically the equivalent of a full night's stay for the 8 hours but it was so nice to have a place to change the baby, nap and have free wifi. The kids had a whale of a time. They were supposed to sleep but I think they thought it was a sleepover. Why do hotels always put beds just far enough apart for kids to jump from one to another?

on bed at the hotel

We made coffee and there was free ice water downstairs and a pool, though we didn't use that. The shuttle was free. It took longer to get to than I expected, having been spoiled once in Paris by staying at an Ibis that you could walk to and was literally next door to the airport. That was sort of what I expected but alas. All the other hotel's shuttles came and we were told that the Fairfield's shuttle driver was asleep in the car park across the way lol.

Despite starting a month early on getting the kids onto American time, the baby was seriously weirded out by our trip. I thought my Super Mom of Three powers might do away with all the waking-up-in-the-night-hourly nonsense but no, baby still reverted to her newborn state for the first week. She also broke a new tooth. It was fun.

middle child cuddling baby in airport

Observations about traveling with three:

• instead of sewing cute swaddling blankets from upcycled materials, I grabbed two bin bags for changing diapers on. they folded up smaller than my reusable diaper changing mat and were disposable, or could be used for rubbish or soiled clothing.
• Baby got that game on the kindle where you hit the 'Tom' cat rather than classic board books like her brothers
• we packed 3 kindles which was good because the built-in tv in front of my husband and sons were broken! Thank goodness for the Ninjago game app!
• instead of sewing my own sling, we used the one we bought this time around. It had clever buckles and was a lot less warm and fiddly than my homemade slings!
• Baby wore her 2nd nicest dress and best frock coat as opposed to my sons who I think wore sleepsuits and jean overalls on their first flights. Baby had a huge following of enthusiastic fans. People offered to hold her so I could eat and take the middle child to the bathroom!

Things I regret on this trip:

• not packing a backup shirt so I had to go shopping for the-shirt-more-expensive-than-my-wedding-dress  

  

  the infamous shirt on the left, verses the wedding dress on right

• not packing the baby's moisturizer creams - after all my banging on about not forgetting prescription medicines, I forgot the baby's
• trying to bag up and bring up diarrhea-covered clothing to wash later. It just got thrown away at a later date after being accidentally discolored in a bucket of bleach by a braindead jetlagged mum.
• not asking my in-laws to turn the heating on the night before - it took hours for our home to warm up and we were freezing
• feeling like I was spending so much money. You spend money to get prepped, you spend money while you're traveling on shirts and food, you spend money to come home. It just felt like an endless spending expedition.
• not being Super Invincible. There was still that feeling of going on when too exhausted to do anything but exist (and maybe not even that). 
• There was still the feeling of being watched all the time and like my parenting was being judged and found wanting - like when I stared fixedly at walls rather than engage my children in nurturing discourse. Or when I fed them candy instead of craisins. Or when I should have taken the baby to the nasty, smelly airplane bathroom for a diaper change but everyone around me was asleep, it was dark, and I just did it on my lap in about 25 seconds and hoped no one noticed.

Recovery

I think it takes a week per person for the family to recover. So if there are 3 of you, it takes 3 weeks, if there are 5 of you, it takes 5 weeks.

So here we are 5 weeks on and starting to feel normal or as normal as you ever feel with 3 children under the age of 6.

Heathrow Airport

London Heathrow has had a bad rep for a long time. Some is legit, some is not deserved, in my opinion.

The Heathrow British Airways baggage handlers' shift ended in the middle of unloading our plane to find two passengers' bags who didn't board. The next shift didn't come on for about 45 minutes so we sat and sat on the unmoving plane for at least an hour and a half till we got permission to use the runway.

The queues went on for miles but every employee at Heathrow was polite. Interestingly I expected their English to be better than Amsterdam or Paris's airports and it was - but most of the people we interfaced with did not speak English as their first language.

Heathrow has amazing escalator systems going up three or more levels. Our kids thought this was novel.

It has lots of shopping and places to eat. There was even a cash machine.

The seats seemed clean and new.

 The ladies bathrooms were clean with free hand cream!

There was this amazing soft play area too - with separated zones for babies and older kids - and an attendant who supervised the play! The best part was that there was a loooooooong couch-like object running alongside and many parents were lying down and napping while their spouse watched the kids.

Being delayed 24 hours while traveling

When I was a little girl I remember an airplane being held for someone who was running late but that seems to have fallen out of vogue these days. Airlines do not hold planes till passengers are boarded. In fact they seem happy to sell your ticket if you merely run a tad late. Many flights are overbooked by two or three seats to prevent waste and it seems airlines almost plan to force two or three to miss a connection.

In our experience airlines will send you on the first leg of your trip even though they know there is no way you will catch your second leg, due to bad weather conditions or other issues. It seems to be their policy to enjoy putting people through the rigmarole of rescheduling.

In December 2014, we missed a connecting flight by a few minutes and saw our plane depart.

If we had magically been able to relax at that point for 22 hours, it would have been one thing. But you're expected to manage your kids in queues for two hours. One set of people deal with re-booking flights, another with hotels. Meanwhile your kids get hungry and frustrated.

You wait so long in queues that by the time you get to see anyone you are just desperate to get somewhere you can eat and rest. This forces you to make split second decisions that are sometimes bad ideas.

For example we agreed to take two separate rooms because they had no family rooms available. They weren't even next to each other. We couldn't remember which room was which so ended up banging on the wrong door a few times.

If I were doing it over again, I would

• ask for food vouchers first thing and send my spouse and kids to get something to eat
• wait with the children in the queues so people can see how upset the children are getting and maybe bump us up in the line - rather than leaving them to meltdown in Baggage Reclaim
• insist on a family room or at least getting next door rooms with an adjoining door
• get double sets of keys, one for each spouse
• write everything down
• ask for longer layovers - an hour per kid is my rule with an upward limit of 3 hours and no less than 45 minutes to prevent missing flights
• report the incident later - you might get a voucher from the airline for your next trip!

It was such a strange environment that the boys did not sleep or eat well and so were not themselves.

We had been stranded in Amsterdam, which was in the wrong direction from where we needed to go and which is an hour off in the wrong direction as well.

This meant that by the time we got to our final destination, the boys slept a couple hours and were up at 3:45 am!

On the upside we reported it to the airline and got vouchers to mostly pay for a trip the following year.