President's Day Weekend

For those of us who work in a preschool the holidays are looked forward to very much. This past weekend we had a four day weekend with the observance of President's Day. My daughters and I were to have the weekend all to ourselves but at the last minute my husband's trip was cancelled and he stayed home with us. We had some plans for shopping and movies but the weather decided we all needed to catch up on much needed rest instead. When we woke up Saturday we had about 2 inches of snow on the ground and ice on the roads. It didn't stay around long because by Sunday the roads were opened and the snow disappeared by lunch time.
Our son however departed on one of the worst airline trips of his life. He was going to check out a college in the northwest and left last Thursday morning around 7:30 am and had to change planes two times before he got to his final destination. His first stop was Chicago and of course the plane was delayed. (I should have known the plane would be delayed, we have a history of delayed planes in Chicago. In 1999 our family moved to Illinois to start a preschool. We had not visited our family for two years and when my sister who worked for an airline offered to get us tickets for a trip to Dallas, the children and I jumped on it. The only problem was the tickets were standby. We arrived at the little airport to fly over to Chicago and they only had 3 seats and we needed 4. The lady at the ticket counter said if you don't mind driving the 2 hours to Chicago we would probably have no trouble getting 4 seats as the flights to Dallas left every 30 minutes. We were so excited we jumped into the car and arrived thinking we would soon be on our way (wrong). When we got to the ticket counter there were about 150 other passengers trying to get to Dallas, too. We went to every gate trying to catch the next flight and by 10:00 pm my husband who had been telling us you won't get out of here tonight struck up a conversation with one of the reservationists and she had a co-worker give us a hotel voucher to spend the night. So around 11:00 pm we went to a hotel to sleep about 4 hours and then took a taxi back to the airport to catch the 7:00 am flight to Dallas. Abigail who was 5 years old then was so tired she lay down in the floor by our chairs and before she fell back asleep said "I don't care what you do just get us on this flight, I'm tired". We did get boarding passes for that flight and finally arrived in Dallas.
So when Thomas called and said he had missed his flight from Seattle to Spokane and was put on standby I did not have a good feeling about. Thankfully I had family living there and they rescued him and even drove him to Spokane the next day. On the return trip he arrived at the airport and was informed because he did not use the last part of his ticket the computer cancelled his return flight. After panicking and trying to reach customer service, he called and said they gave him his boarding passes all the way back to Nashville. Great I thought until he called and said his flight from Spokane to Seattle was delayed and now we wondered if he would get there before the Chicago flight left. At lease they gave him a seat close to the door so he could run leave the plane first. He barely had time to run from that plane and get to the next one before they left. I was so glad when he got home. Finally last night I got the best night of sleep since he left. It's good to have the family home. I just wish the rest of our children lived close by.