We put the kids to work setting the apartment back to rights. Obviously we don’t have to clean it thoroughly or anything, but there is a certain amount of tidying up that (a) seems to be common courtesy and (b) is required if you want to find all your belongings in the corners.
At the end we had time for a little relaxation, or at least to keep the smaller ones occupied while the rest of us finished up. Mark needed to repair a curtain rod that the 3yo had pulled down a couple of days prior.
I shot a selfie in my traveling clothes.
And a couple more of the apartment: the view from the kitchen window of the lovely blue sky:
And stepped out on the balcony into the perfect autumn day, and looked down at Bloomsbury Square:
A van was coming to transfer us and our luggage to Heathrow. On our way back from the pub the other night, Mark and I had walked around the block that contained our apartment’s little pedestrian street, looking for a good place to wait for it. We found a sign that marked a spot as Loading Zone Only, just around the corner and across one street, and that didn’t specify who was allowed to load. So the teen boys worked to transfer the seven big suitcases and the backpacks and the car seats into a pile on the curb, one watching over the pile while the other went back and forth fetching bags.
I gathered up the three smaller children, with the carrier and my tote crammed full of things I needed to take with me on the plane. I dropped my apartment keys on the little side table, the one with the selfie mirror, and went out the door and let it shut and lock behind me.
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The four of spent the waiting-for-the-van time in the tot lot at Bloomsbury Square Gardens.
Then I got the text from Mark:
We got in the van, and after a ten-minute standstill because of construction traffic around Bloomsbury Square, were off. I watched the neighborhoods slip away: Soho, Marylebone, Hyde Park, Acton, Ealing.
Heathrow.
We grabbed lunch in the airport at Leon, a Mediterranean-ish chain restaurant. My last English meal was thus a fish finger wrap.
And a bottle of sparkling water. I am going to miss Sparkling Water Available Wherever Still Water Is Sold.
And to the plane.
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The three-hour hop to Reykjavik on IcelandAir was uneventful, except for a slight mixup in ticket-reading that had us rushing off the plane to make an impossibly short connection that turned out to actually be more than an hour.
At takeoff for our six-hour flight to Minneapolis, despite the lollipops and sips of water I had at the ready, the 3yo appeared to be having Ear Problems. He shrieked, squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head “no,” and cried that he had a headache. And then, quite suddenly, he stopped crying, panted a bit with his eyes half closed, and fell asleep.
It was maybe five or six p.m. in the time zone we’d come from, which is not a crazy time for him to be having a nap, so I let him. He slept for a few hours, then woke up cranky and refusing to eat the bag of crackers in his complementary IcelandAir kids’ meal.
We went to and from the bathroom a couple of times. And then, with two hours left in the flight, he threw up all over himself and his carseat.
I was relatively prepared! I had two changes of clothes for him and a lot of baby wipes. Mark switched seats with the 11yo to sit next to me and get help from the flight attendants, and we got him cleaned up, the seat cleaned up, a plastic bag for him to sit on so the damp seat wouldn’t be uncomfortable, and all the soiled clothes packed away in waterproof bags, and a pile of paper towels at the ready in case he got sick again.
Then he threw up again, mostly but not entirely on the pile of paper towels that I thrust under his chin. More help from the flight attendants. I was glad for Mark talking to them, accepting towels and plastic bags, so I could attend entirely to my sad, sick, and uncomfortable little boy.
How much easier a sudden crisis can be when another person frees you up to deal with the crisis by talking to the people who are trying to help, so you don’t have to waste any energy turning back and forth, adopting alternate positions of Crisis Management and Oh Gosh Thank You.
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The third vomit was nothing left but bile, but I caught it in a plastic garbage bag that was ready on his lap for the rest of the trip. The 3yo said he felt better, and volunteered to walk on his own carrying his backpack. Through the customs line, until they took pity on us and invited us to the head of the line, he stumbled forward a few steps and then lay down on his backpack until we had to urge him forward again.
Really sick and not just airsick? Hard to say. We’d been up for twenty hours and this was not all that different from his behavior in the UK customs line a couple of weeks ago, when he was entirely well.
I texted a vomit warning to H., but she was unfazed. “We’ll risk it,” she texted back. And when the two cabs we hired made it to our street, our house was already lit and full of friends.
I carried the sleeping 3yo straight up to bed, changed my clothes, and washed my hands really well before coming down to company.
And food!
Fish tacos!
GUACAMOLE.
Even a birthday cake.
And milk, eggs, fruit, and English muffins for the morning.
I ate, and the kids reconnected, and we chatted, and I settled into my chair with a glass of red wine from a box, and was happy to be home. And just as we started to flag, they packed up, said “Bye! See you Monday!” and went home, leaving us fed and ready for bed.
The pile of held mail on the counter can wait, the suitcases can wait, the laundry can wait (even the 3yo’s backpack), for one night’s sleep to the sound of the ticking of the ceiling fan in my own bedroom.
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