Goodbye Brazil, we hope to see you again soon!

After a wonderful two weeks in Brazil it was time to head back home.  We had a pretty long trip ahead of us, but we were in great spirits!  We were going straight from the beach to the airport, a two hour ride.  Then we had to wait about 3 hours to depart - yes, at 2am, with 4 little ones under the age of 2 (Bobby & family were traveling back with us)!  The kids once again hung in there, played at the airport, got their pj's on, and ready to board the flight.

We were on a slightly smaller plane on the way back, a 767 - we had a window, aisle, aisle seats reserved.  This time we had a very obnoxious flight attendant who started picking on us from the get-go - a power struggle of sorts.  She was very "curious" about the CARES harness seatbelt we had for Ava, that is a type of supplemental 5-point harness belt to attach to the seatbelt and seat to better secure a little one like Ava (mostly for take-off & landing).  Ava had worn it on the way down, and we had no issues with it with the flight crew.  This time, though, the flight attendant's first comment was "I've heard of these... I've never seen one in use, though".  At about 4am, after we had already reached cruising altitude, had already been served "dinner", and Ava was already comfortably asleep, snuggled up in her seat, leaning over on Daddy, that same flight attendant noticed Ava had her arms outside the straps and was not really using the harness at that point.  She came over and began to physically move Ava and told us that if we were going to use the harness, we needed to use it the "proper" way.  Ava woke up to find this strange woman in her face, trying to get her arms back inside the seatbelt, and Ava completely freaked out!  She started screaming crying, was very upset, and it took me switching seats with Daddy, handing sleeping Alex off to him, to get Ava to calm down (a good 15 minutes that also disturbed all the people around us).  The flight attendant walked off when she saw what a mess she had created. At this point, Ava also realized her clothes were a little wet from her milk that had spilled, and she HATES being wet.  It took me a little while to decipher what she was screaming about (I'm wet! I'm wet!!).  So right there in the seat I quickly undressed her, changed her diaper, and worked on getting her back to sleep.  About an hour later that flight attendant was walking by, kind of paused by us, and started to say something to me (though I couldn't hear her very well).  I immediately thought she was getting on my case again about how Ava was laying down (we had removed the harness completely to get her off our case), so I told her "she is wearing her seatbelt, do NOT touch her".  The woman must have felt bad, because what she wanted to do was to give Ava a blanket.  She said the air conditioner was blowing right where Ava was and she didn't want her to get cold.  I figured it was her way of apologizing, so I let her give me a blanket for Ava.  For the rest of the flight she kind of went out of her way to be nicer, but I was still not letting her get too close to us.

Alex happy and wide awake at 2am!  What a party animal! ;)

The rest of the trip was fine.  We got in and out of immigration just fine, even though here in the US we don't have the wonderful family priority lines Brazil does.  They don't really care if you have exhausted little babies.

We got our things, stopped by Uncle Trey's office to pick up Daddy's laptop, and decided to go ahead and make the drive back home (another 4 hours) since the kids were already sleeping again in the car.  We arrived home pretty tired after 24 hours of travel, but happy to be back in our home to get ready for Christmas. :)