Friday, January 8, 2016

Southwest Airlines is the best!

Let's talk about Southwest airlines for a second.

They are just the best.

We love them so much, signing up for their Southwest Credit card has helped us tons, and we love earning points that go directly to flights to help us travel to see family more often!

2 free bags? Yes please.

Family boarding? Yes please?

Really nice flight attendants? Yep. I just can't say enough positive things about this company

This time coming home from our Christmas vacation we are cheap idiots and booked a flight to leave Saturday night at 11 pm and then drive through the night from Denver to Lincoln (our original plans were to be in Laramie, WY right after school for interviews and then fly out of Denver which is 1.5 hours away but interviews got cancelled because of bad roads but we still had to proceed forth with our flights, ha)

We arrive at the airport with 2 babies strapped onto us, Maxson running around (I forgot his ladybug leash backpack (man bug bag, thank you very much) at my mom's house much to our dismay, backpacks (1 on each of us), 4 luggage (one of those being a very heavy carryon full of computers, camera, and books), and 2 carseats. Ooh, we had so much stuff coming home from Christmas!!!!!

So we go check in and when we give them our confirmation numbers the agent say "Oh no, your flight goes out tomorrow night!" We couldn't believe it! AHHHHHHHH! In our minds we booked this flight for Saturday night so we could drive home Sunday morning and have a day to recover before Casey goes to school, we must have accidentally booked it on the wrong day when we were going back and forth between days of what to do. Oh man!!!!!

That kind woman goes and talks to a fellow Southwest gate agent, comes back and I hear her kinda yell back to the other woman "Ok, that's what I was thinking, it's the right thing to do." She then tells us she'll just move our flight to tonight for us. BLESS THAT WOMAN'S HEART!

She said there were 7 empty seats (in reality when we were on the plane there was 30 extra seats so it was really no big deal but still, they had no obligation to, but still did it for us which was SOOOOOOOO nice!)

Security went smooth (a million times faster than Denver's Security!), the babies were adorable in the airport waiting to get on the plane talking to all the strangers, we got stared at a ton from every stranger who couldn't believe we EACH had a baby strapped to the front of us (not small babies either I might add!) PLUS another kid with us, we were that circus. The babies slept on the flight, Quinn, who I had, went to sleep right away without a problem, Bryson chose to be awake quite a bit longer for poor Casey and after a tiny fit went to sleep in the baby whisperer's arms. Max somehow stayed awake the whole time watching a movie, he's crazy. Since it was a pretty empty flight we both had rows to ourselves which was the best!

A great thing I did this time around was hook the kids camelback's to a caribeaner onto the outside of my backpack and left them empty which made it all quick, easy, and not heavy. And then in one of my water bottles I filled it with milk for the babies.

We landed early, found our bags pretty easily. A great friend of mine in the Denver (hi Charley!) area did this tricky car situation for us and we walked out of baggage claim to our car there in pretty much the first parking spot at 1 am. IT WENT SO SMOOTHLY!


The kids all fell asleep immediately in the car, we stopped once to fill up with gas on the 6.5 hour drive. Casey drive the first 3.5 hours listening to the podcast Serial, I then drove the next 3 hours listening to what he had just heard. (we have SOOO enjoyed listening to it! can't wait to finish it! I was amazed at how easy the drive went for us all!

We got home at 8:45 am to our neighbors leaving for church. Our kids had just woken up and were going to be nowhere near letting us relax at home. But we were both surprisingly not that tired. So we packed up the crew and headed out to 9 am church getting there a bit late. We stayed in the hall the whole time not wanting to even THINK about struggling with out children inside the room our meeting was in which was good because they were all loud and needed time to roam.

I'm really glad we went to church. It's an important thing for us that our family go to church each week, we've been asked to keep the Sabbath Day holy and we're trying our hardest! Yeah, it was hard and it would have been SO much easier to stay home but that just didn't feel right. I've made covenants to keep the Sabbath Day Holy and bear His name, going to church is a very simple way I can show my love and gratitude towards my Father in Heaven!

Glad we are home!!!!!!!!!

PS- our original flight we accidentally scheduled for Sunday night ended up being delayed from 11 pm to 1:30 am!!!!!!!!!!! How awful would that have been for our little family! Tender mercy we were able to leave Saturday night!