the adlards

It was weird getting up this morning, coming downstairs to see the brilliant sunshine streaming into the livingroom and then realising we probably shouldn’t dash outside barefoot it being two degrees. Yes, we’re home again. We don’t have three quarters of an acre and the fridge does smell like three-week-old milk, but it’s home nonetheless.

It was hard to leave Cape Town, we had a wonderful time.

It was particularly hard to leave because, having packed and prepared everything on Friday evening Sophie threw up all over her sleeping bag and all over Michelle’s travelling clothes. I popped the things in to wash and then as I started them in the dryer the power went out. At 3.30 on Saturday morning when Michelle was feeding Sophie the power was back on and the clothes were nearly dry so I set it for another hour and crawled back into bed.

The rest of the trip was as smooth as twelve hours of air travel with two Very Small People is ever likely to be. BA at Cape Town didn’t call parents with children first (they insisted they had but we wouldn’t have missed that), so we were crushed for half an hour behind security barriers holding children, hand luggage and pushchair. On the plane Sophie threw up a feed once and Josie wet her seat twice (in addition to going to the toilets with me quite happily on two or three other occassions). She was badly frightened by the flushing noise on the trip out and evidently needed prompting as a result. I’m not sure what the cleaning regime is between long-haul flights, but I hope it includes steam cleaning of kids’ areas.

At Heathrow the luggage took upwards of an hour to hit the belts although belt four was the only one in use. We eventually found ourselves as one of five small groups standing about staring vacantly at the empty belts when a voice helpfully informed us that golf clubs, skis and other unusually-shaped objects were at the other end of the baggage reclaim hall. Sure enough there was Josie’s zebra-on-a-stick (hobby zebra). One frustrated taxi driver and we were home …

I suspect normality will come as something of a shock.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 5th, 2006 at 4:05 pm by james and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.