no wonder we fly
don’t you hate flying with all those kids? magnificent and i get asked on a regular basis.
not nearly as much as the people around us, is our usual answer, and honestly, after the weekend we have just had, it seems that contained spaces, and planes are the safest modes of transport for our family.
thursday jasper broke free from charles’ grip in the car park and raced for the door. charles roared for jasper to stop, but since when does jasper listen to anything but the sound of his own voice, his guitar and his long lashes dusting the top of his cheeks? and when a car turned (at a reasonable speed) and jasper was running toward it, if the car hadn’t veered into a thankfully empty parking spot, well it could have gotten pretty unfortunate. just the other day i was praying for physical protection for the kids!
saturday charles and i took the kids to ifc mall. we needed to do some speciality shopping and thought that it would be fun to take the kids and let them run on the higher floors of the mall that are virtually unoccupied. the girls were wearing pink tutu’s, pink tights, and over top of that, green fuzzy jumpers.
at one point, carys asked if she could do a wee. we located a toilet and i beckoned to sela, "come on, sela, let’s go," and she looked at me and defiantly said, "i dont want to do a wee" and she ran in the general direction of her dad. what a girl. when carys and i exited, i saw charles, who was leading jasper and sebastian into the lavatories, "just to wash hands" he told me.
"well you have sela" i said to him.
"no, you do."
and then we realised, neither of us did.
we looked at each other and for a flash second i was so grateful we weren’t, well, basically anywhere else in the world where a missing child would call for doors to be locked down and real hysteria. yes i was upset, but i knew this wasn’t life or death.
some people walking towards us saw our obviously stricken faces and carys’ tutu. they said, "hey, are you looking for the other one of those?" and we said, "YES!" "she’s over there, a long way." charles took off and i asked them how she seemed. "she’s crying, calling for her mum."
the kids and i took after charles, and more and more people began telling me (as soon as they saw carys) that sela was ahead, crying and upset. the kids were all running and so was i.
then i saw sela, with a lady i know vaguely from church. we go to different services. sela saw her dad and raced to him. she said something, a proclamation of love, i was sure. and then they hugged. charles walked back to me, his lips white.’
"do you know what she said, tess? she said, ‘i don’t want to do a wee.’"
huh. little cow. we cancelled the restaurant lunch we had planned and headed home. ate moussaka instead, which wasn’t such a punishment.
later that day, i took the triplets with me to a department store, wing on. we took the bus. the first bus didn’t stop for us. there was space all right , but the driver looked at the kids, then at me, and shook his head and drove on. SUCH DISCRIMINATION!
we grabbed another bus and got dropped off fairly close to our destination. we had to walk two blocks, go up one escalator, and then through a shop, across a street and that was about it. however, at the escalator, jasper dropped the rock he had found and liked, and didn’t get on the escalator and then started crying when he saw that i was five steps up. so i told the girls to keep riding the escalator and i walked down the escalator and grabbed jasper. upon hearing a scream from fellow escalator rider, i looked up just to see sela fall down the escalator: she had been trying to follow me. WHY NOW? carys fell because she forgot to get off the escalator, so all three were crying. it took me making a very interesting story about the man who lives underneath the bridge to make them stop bawling.
SUNDAY – and incase you have ever made the error of subscribing to the 1980’s tagline "take it easy, take the train" – sunday carys vomitted all over herself (BUT NO ONE ELSE, but yes, on the floor), while on the mtr.
what will happen if we go on the star ferry?
