The Trip Home

Our flight home left Boston at 8:30 PM.  We thought that this would be perfect.  The boys usually sleep on the first flight and this flight was 5 hours.  We got everyone settled on the plane, Addie had her Princess and the Popstar crew all buckled up with her.  

 I let Garrett climb around until it was time to take off.  We had him dressed in PJs, we were very optimistic that he would sleep.

Doesn't he look sweet?

 Ben checking out the coloring book that Iceland Air handed out.

 Garrett was all snuggled in.  He did end up sleeping, for about an hour of the first flight.  So he was awake and kicking the seat in front of him for most of the remaining 4 hours.  I did take him out of his car seat and try and entertain him, but it was mostly a lost cause.  Addie and Ben both slept most of the way in the row behind me with Jon.  I am not sure how he always gets the sleepers, but he does.

 The second flight of the night was a little delayed in Iceland, but we did eventually make it back to Oslo.  This picture is from Boston, but it shows all of our wonderful suitcases and carry-ons that we had with us.  As an expat in an expensive country having 10 suitcases to fill up sounded wonderful.  I will say that 10 suitcases starts to go from being a blessing to being a burden.  I don't think that we will ever try to travel with that many suitcases again.  We had two carts full of suitcases and we each had to carry a back pack, push a cart and drag either a suitcase or a car seat.  The fact that we managed as well as we did shows what a good team Jon and I are.
The other real blessing in this story are our friends Yolandi and Stefan.  They used our car while we were gone and they agreed to come and pick us up at the train station.  Stefan came all the way to the track and helped carry kiddos and push carts and drag suitcases.  We loaded up the car and Jon drove home with all our luggage and Garrett.  Addie, Ben and I hopped on the local train and headed back to our neck of the woods.  Jon went home and unloaded the suitcases and came down the road to pick us up.

When Jon and I got home we looked at each other and said "We did it!"  All of the different pieces of our trip worked just like they were supposed to.  That is more a lot of answered prayers than any thing and we are so thankful.  What a blessing this whole trip was!
Here I am finally snuggling with my sleepy boy.

 Here is a little girl that hates to nap, passed out on the couch.

We are still working on getting back to Oslo time.  There have been several late nights in the past week and very late mornings, all of us sleeping until 10:30 AM one morning!
The real world starts back tomorrow when I have to be up and have everyone dressed and ready to go to put Addie on the school bus.