the friendly skies

What kind of flyer are you? good? bad? nervous? are you asleep before the plane takes off? do you deal well with delays? turbulence? does it scare you to fly? do you get motion sickness? do you arrive chronically early? do you get sent to the front of the check-in line because you are running very, very late? do you check your flight time online before you leave? do you head to the airport no matter what?

i feel like every single person handles flying differently. for me, i’m not a nervous flyer. i’m not scared. i don’t get sick. i just don’t like the chaos. i don’t like the waiting in lines. being asked questions. taking off my shoes. collapsing the stroller to fit through the xray machine. chasing after antsy kids. overpriced food. i don’t love delays…but they don’t make me crazy either.

the truth is, for me, when i’m not travelling with my kids, i am a pretty laid-back flyer. all i need is an ipod and i’m good to go. i’m not an arrive-at-the-airport-hours-before-my-flight kind of person, but the husband is, so we are always at the airport with plenty of time to spare. i mean, i could do without the stale coffee smell of the airport…but otherwise, no biggie.

there is no one on this planet, though, who flies like my mother. no one.

it’s not hours before her flight that she needs to be there, it’s days. she doesn’t check her flight on the internet. i don’t know if it’s because she isn’t a huge web person and doesn’t really know how…or that she doesn’t believe what it’s saying. after this weekend’s catastrope, i’d say it’s the latter.

you see, there was a big giant snowstorm in the midwest. and my mother was afraid that her 8:30 flight to Milwaukee was not going to take off. so, by sunday morning at 8 am, she was already panicking and pacing. she made us call everyone and their mother to find out if flights were flying in and out of General Mitchell airport. at 5:30, her flight, online, was showing that it was on time.

so, the husband said that they’d leave around 6:30. oh no. she needed to leave at 5:50. for an 8:30 flight. could you just die? as they were walking out the door, painfully early, the husband checked one more time. the flight was delayed. until 10:30.

"maybe we should still go to the airport. maybe the computer is wrong."

we forced her to sit down. all the pacing and lip pursing was giving us migraines. she called the airline and sat on the phone for over an hour to have them tell her that the flight is scheduled for 10:30 and whever she reads online is correct. we weren’t going to say we told her so…but we told her so.

more pacing and panic.

she called again.this time we convinced her to rebook for the morning, since now it was showing 11:00pm. this way she could sit down and relax. so, she did. but she didn’t sit or relax. she made the husband check the flight every 15 minutes…even though she was rebooked on a 9:30 am flight. every 15 minutes. checking on a flight that she wasn’t even taking.

i. have. never.

song of the day: Goodbye My Lover by James Blunt

video of the day: the absolute best part of the oscars last night:

check out the new urbanmoms. ca bloggers!!! Amreen and Elizabeth! go over and say hi. tell ’em i sent you.

and of course, visit me at my other home, Cheaper Than Therapy for my Oscar recap.