"Home" for the Holidays!!!

Well our adventure started at 4:30 AM UK time (so about 10:30PM on Friday Central time). Obviously I couldn't sleep the night before but the "Velvet Hammers" that our neighbors served us for our Christmas dinner the night before helped a little bit. Anyway our driver, Karen, picked us up at the house around 5:45 AM and we made our way down to Heathrow.

Kevin and I were wondering how things would go on our trip home but we found that traveling with an infant definitely has it's advantages and disadvantages...we hit a lot of advantages. We got fast tracked through security at Heathrow and they bumped us up the the bulkhead seats on the plane - awesome. The stewardesses were very friendly, but sometimes they tried getting Addie's attention when we were trying to get her to sleep. Addie was pretty well behaved on the plane except she's at the stage that she wants to crawl around instead of sit for 9 hours. We got into Chicago okay, but we had only 1 hour to catch our flight to Cedar Rapids. We finally had someone fast track us through dropping off our luggage after US Customs because we had a baby - another YES!!!. After rushing to the train we headed to security, but along the way we saw what we feared...our flight was cancelled!!!! I instantly started crying...and was sobbing to the ticket agent who let us cut ahead in line (again because we had a baby). We found out that there were no seats for us on any flights later that night, so we were forced to stay over night in Chicago. Funny thing is that we ended up by accident at the same hotel Kevin and I stayed at when our flight to England was cancelled in June. As we waited for our shuttle, we got a Vienna hot dog from a vendor and it was the best hot dog we've had ever!!! Our luggage got sent on to Iowa on the 9:30PM flight so we only had the bags on our backs and the clothes on our bodies. Fortunately I packed a pair of Addie's PJs in my back pack and the airline did give us baby food, diapers, and formula so that was a help. Another blessing was that CAT hadn't turned off Kevin's work cell phone so we could communicate with family. We crashed in the hotel around 6:30 PM (12:30 AM our body clock time). We woke up at 2:30 AM ready for our day's adventure because we were still adjusting to the time change. We played with Addie and watched TV until we had to head to the airport again. We finally got to Cedar Rapids and had my family awaiting us which was so amazing to see them. We were very fortunate that we could get a hotel room and could get home the next morning, because lots of flights from Chicago were cancelled and people were stuck at the airport.

We finally got to mom and dad's to be amazed by white snow and beautiful Christmas decorations. Dad started up a fire and I sat in front of the fireplace and admired being in their warm log cabin for the holidays.