The Jensens’ UK Adventure

Week 1: September 11, 2007

Emma and Jake at the Vancouver airport

We made it to England, after the worst, most brutal 17 hours of my life (worse than the time I ran into my friend Danny's head with my tooth and it turned black and fell out, worse than when I went backpacking with Erik and my toenails fell out and it took 9 months for them to grow back, worse than my 36-hour labor with Emma.) It was Jake's fault, mostly, being an extremely active, stubborn, and pretty much uncontrollable 3-year old. Keeping in mind that we flew in September, during the school year, there were NO OTHER CHILDREN on our flights to out-misbehave mine. By the time we were into our third leg some 12 or 15 or 25 hours later on the flight from Montreal, Canada, to Heathrow, Jake was completely volatile and quite unstable.

At about 7 pm our time, the attendants decided it was time to darken the plane so that everyone could sleep (must have been midnight or thereabouts over the ocean where we were.) You can't make a child go to sleep when his inner clock is messed up, I've found. In fact, you can't keep your child from kicking the seat in front of him and yelling at the top of his lungs when he's absolutely giddy with sleep deprivation. We were yelled at by two passengers and a flight attendant...okay, perhaps not yelled at, but sternly scolded. As if I was just sitting there blindly allowing him to run rampant instead of desperately trying to rein him in with every toy, snack and Ipod song we had. One of those passengers was heard muttering under his breath that if he had children, which he never will, his children would never behave so poorly (Laura was seated in front of him and treated to this little tidbit of nastiness.) There was nothing Laura could do to help at this point, so I grabbed Jake bodily and held him tightly in my lap, whispering in a deadly undertone in his ear about how I would be so happy to deposit him in the airplane toilet if only he would fit…that sort of thing. I did not sleep a wink during our entire trip, as I diligently watched over Jake's every breath so that he would not disturb the other passengers' beauty sleep. Jake, on the other hand, fell asleep an hour before our plane landed in London. I'm sure you can see some irony in there.

But grumpy preschoolers, passengers and plane rides aside, we are here. (Emma, by the way, was outstandingly well-behaved.) Erik met us at 8:00 a.m., in his suit and tie, at the airport with a school van and one of his British co-teachers as driver. We piled in, all of us with our 12 pieces of luggage, and were driven with dizzying speed and recklessness, on the wrong side of the road no less, from London to our flat in Esher (maybe a 45 minute drive from London with no traffic.) I don't remember the ride, except that I was in a stinky van that was probably used to transport hundreds of sweaty, smelly teenage boys to and from their sporting events. Both Laura and I were dazed and exhausted.

Outside our new flat