Kate with our friend Abigail during our trip to Albuquerque.

(As usual for me these days, I started writing this eons ago, so some of the information is dated. For instance, tomorrow it will be October. The trip I'm talking about and showing photos of happened at the end of July. But the part about it being 108 degrees? Yeah, that happened, and it seems like it was just yesterday.)

Recently we returned from a trip to Albuquerque, and while I am happy to say that our trip was a smashing success, I have been suffering a bit of post-high-desert depression upon returning to the absolutely smothering heat that is engulfing South Texas right now. The weather app on my phone says it is going to be 108 degrees tomorrow. One-zero-eight. That is just inhumane.

So since my current plans involve camping out in my air conditioned home until January, I thought I would go ahead and share a little horror story from my recent brush with airline travel. I need to note at the start that I am acting in solidarity with my sister Hannah and my sister-in-law Kelly, who have both recently blogged terrible travel stories of their own. Both of their stories make me look like a whiner, but in the Rice family, storytelling is a sport and Kelly said she would only blog hers if I would blog mine, so here we are. Game on.

We started making plans for a return trip to Albuquerque back in April. This is important because in April, Isaac was not walking. That small fact explains a lot. Specifically, it explains why I chose to have all four of us travel to Albuquerque together, but for the kids and I to stay in Albuquerque an additional three days after Dan went back to Texas for work. This means that I would be doing the return trip to Texas without Dan. In my mind, when I was planning this day of solo flying for me and the kids, I was picturing Isaac being happy in the stroller and Kate being the model veteran air traveler that she is.

Isaac and his buddy Owen shared a snack at the Albuquerque Zoo.

Well, it turns out that babies change all the time. I am not sure if you knew that or not, but it's true. You might want to write that down and tape it up somewhere in your house if you have small kids. Because by the time July rolled around and I was watching Isaac sprint all over my house like Thing One every minute of the day, I was starting to wonder what had ever possessed me to sign up for this. But tickets were already bought and there wasn't really any backing out of it. So off we went.

Our time in Albuquerque was so much fun, so worth the travel and deserving of another post on its own. To illustrate that point, I will intersperse some photos from our trip through this post of us and our Albuquerque peeps. Dan went back to Texas on Sunday, the kids and I stayed a couple more days and then it was time for the big return trip. Since realizing what I was in for, I had spent a lot of time planning how I would survive, but in fact many of my plans turned out to be unneccesary because Mike and Susan, who were already hosting us for our trip, rode to the rescue, as they always do. It turned out that Susan was leaving for a trip on the very day we returned to San Antonio, and our flights left Albuquerque within 15 minutes of one another. It would have been amazing enough just to have another adult to go through the security line with me and the kids, but going above and beyond as they usually do, Mike and Susan managed the return of my rental car and helped me get us and all our luggage checked in. Then Susan, who could have been having a totally reasonable pre-flight period of eating a meal sitting down or reading a book, chose instead to go through security with me and my three-ring circus, then help us get breakfast and do bathroom breaks before it was time to board. May her reward be great in heaven. Seriously.

Mike and Susan also hosted a cookout at their house during our visit and all these kiddos ran around in a screaming pack in the rain and had a completely wonderful time. Here they are in a brief moment of stillness.

So my fretting was largely in vain, but when I was still in fretting mode I had come up with a solution for almost every travel issue that could arise, save one. I could not, for the life of me, figure out what in the world I would do if myself or one of the kids had to visit the lavatory on the airplane. We've all seen these things. You can barely fit yourself in there, much less yourself and a kid. Add a second kid in and the whole thing starts to sound like a clown car act. No, I decided, there was no way to do it, so I just wouldn't, Our flights were reasonably short. I would make darn sure we went to the bathroom immediately before boarding and just avoid the whole issue entirely.

When I made this plan, it should have set off red flags in my mind, since every other parenting strategy I have ever come up with based purely on denial has backfired spectacularly (Santa, anyone?) but I really thought it was reasonable. Thus, on the morning of our flights, we made multiple trips to the bathroom. Minutes before we boarded I made one last trip for insurance. And, sensing my desperation, Kate did what any three year old would do in that situation -- she refused to go to the bathroom. I put her up on the toilet and sat there, telling her why it was important for her to go now. But all to no avail. She really didn't have to go, she said.

Kate with her good friend Bonny, who mails her letters.

I think you all know what happened next. We got on the plane. I performed the one-handed folding up of our stroller at the end of the jetway with Isaac in my arms. We got into our seats and got our seatbelts on. Then, in a miracle of timing, Isaac stopped bouncing around like a ping pong ball, nursed and fell asleep during takeoff. He was out like a light and I was starting to feel like there was a really good chance he would sleep through the whole flight if I just ignored the tingling pain of my arm falling asleep and didn't move a muscle. Kate was happily watching "Annie" on the i-Pod. We were about 45 minutes into the flight, and I was about to breathe a sigh of relief.

(We celebrated Katie's Lilevjen's birthday while we were in town, which made me almost as happy as getting to see all the Lilevjens again!)

And then Kate turned to me and said the words all parents dread hearing on a trip. "Mommy, I have to go potty." Well, that's not entirely accurate. What she said first was "I don't want to wear this seatbelt." Then when I told her she had to keep wearing the seatbelt because it is one of the airplane rules to be safe, she pondered that for a moment and then pulled out the potty trump card. I could see the thoughts forming in her brain -- "If I say I have to go potty Mom will have to let me out of the seat belt!" -- and it made me want to bang my head on the seat because I knew that it was total fiction. I don't want to give you more information than you need, but Kate has demonstrated many times since she got full potty trained that she can hold it for incredible amounts of time when she wants to. Key words: Wants to.

My attempts to convince her to use her bladder-holding superpowers for good ended in increasingly high-pitched proclamations of "I need to go POOOOOOOOOTTTTY!" And really, to your fellow airline passengers there is no way to get through that without sounding like you are A) torturing your child and B) about to ruin a perfectly good airplane seat. So there was nothing for it but to unbuckle all three of us and start the trek to the front of the plane, where there was not, as far as I could tell, any line for the bathroom. Isaac woke up in the process and started doing that angry, disoriented thrashing move that small children do when woken from a deep sleep. Kate was doing little dance steps up the aisle while I tried to keep Isaac from kicking people in the head. It was a long walk to the front of the plane, only to find once we were there that the lavatory was, in fact, occupied. This fact was relayed to me by a flight attendant who I had not seen sitting there until that moment. "It's occupied," she said, glancing up from her book.

I want to take a moment to state that I have flown a lot in my life, and never once have I been anything but charming to airline personnel. For the most part, they have been nothing but charming to me. And maybe this woman and I were just not having the best day, but we surely did get off on the wrong foot. Because when I paused there in the empty space next to the bathroom with my two children, trying to determine what would be the best thing to do in the probably 10 seconds before whoever was in the bathroom came out, Book Reading Flight Attendant glanced up again to say, "Ma'am? You can't stand here. You'll have to wait in your seat."

Yes, she did.

I don't know if I should be sorry that I could not contain the exaggerated eye-rolling that this statement provoked in me or proud that I did contain the desire to reach over there and smack that book out of her hand. Either way, we had a very tense exchange wherein I gestured to the back of the plane and asked if I could go back there and join the absolute CROWD that was standing around idly by that lavatory door. Seriously, there were two flight attendants and some other person just hanging out, shooting the breeze, and I didn't notice TSA coming to arrest them. So we started the long hike to the other end of the plane. Dance, kick, dance, kick, squawk of indignation from toddler, repeat. Man, people on that plane LOVED us.

Me and my friend Erika in the blue light of the seal and sea lion exhibit at the zoo. The look on my face is one of joy over being with Erika. This stands in stark contrast to the look on my face during the incident I am describing.)

Once we got back to the block party and pried the lavatory door open, I realized I had another problem. Airplane toilets are absurdly high off the ground, and there was no way Kate would be able to sit on one unassisted. Meanwhile Isaac had reached a critical juncture in his flailing that required him to try to bang his head on the walls of the plane. Clearly there was no way I could deal with him and Kate at the same time. Thankfully at this point a flight attendant redeemed the name of Southwest Airlines forever for me and bravely offered to hold Isaac while I helped Kate. Isaac, of course, was thrilled with this plan, right? No. He screamed his head off for the entire time it took me to assist Kate, which, by the way, I had to do with the lavatory door wide open because there was no way to get us both in and close the door.

So in summary, flying with both kids overall went much, much better than I could have imagined. Except that the part about the bathroom was every bit as horrible as I thought it would be. I am trying not to read too much into this as I ponder attempting my first drive to Mississippi alone with both kids in the near future. I am assuming the whole two-kids-to-the-public-restroom experience doesn't improve much in, say, a gas station in rural Louisiana. I'll let you know.