Let's Start at the Very Beginning

So this is the beginning of our trip. My friend Michelle and I flew to SL together with our 7, count them, seven, children.This is in Milwaukee, before we even took off the first time. Don't they all look happy?
We originally had a three hour layover in Denver, so when the airline couldn't find my stroller and we had given Michelle's stroller to a pregnant woman with a baby who was also flying alone to Salt Lake, we got Happy Meals for lunch and settled down to wait. An hour into it, the mother who had Michelle's stroller found us and let us know that our flight had been canceled and we were supposed to go to customer service ASAP.

I went with every intention of muscling my way onto the next flight, no matter what. Fortunately, Kelly called me while I was in line and talked me down. Once I was rational (which meant not screaming, "You stay calm with seven children in an airport"), we talked strategy. I calmly told the attendant, "We are fine to fly out at 9:30 tonight (swallowing hard), I just need my stroller and some food for our seven babies." I put a lot of emphasis on the seven. And it worked! The woman gave us travel vouchers, plenty of food vouchers, and promised me a rental stroller. When I was still waiting an hour later for the stroller, she gave us more travel vouchers. All told, Michelle and I more than paid for our trip in the 10 hours we killed in Denver.
This picture is a little hard to see, but it's after a lovely meal at Chef Jimmy's (the food was actually REALLY good) and $36 of cookies because you don't get change from a voucher. You have to spend the whole thing. The kids thought it was so cool to get to pick anything from the dessert place! But the result is the picture above: Boston jumping over the seats. We had kids climbing up and leaping off the arrival/departure signs, sprinting on the moving walkways, and engaging in rowdy games of tag, hide & seek, and follow the leader. Michelle and I were pretty much spent by the 8th hour, so we let the kids do whatever they wanted. After five hours of trying hard, I gave up preventing the baby from sucking on everything in the airport and instead directed my efforts on praying that she wouldn't get swine flu.

We did finally make it to Salt Lake, and I think it took a few days to decompress. I was so glad to share the day with Michelle, partly because when the kids had friends, it made time go faster, and partly because I needed someone else to corroborate my story. It's a little hard to believe and even harder to remember because I blocked a lot of it from my memory.