Baptism by Fire!

WE MADE IT!!! We are officially in England and it's even more beautiful than I remembered. It is 11:02pm here in the UK which means it's 6:02 on the East Coast. No worries about me not falling to sleep at 6 o'clock at night though because I have had I think a total of 6 hours of sleep in the last 72 hours. Sleep is inevitable -momentarily. I will try and make this brief since I can barely keep my eyelids open but I just wanted to let you guys know we made it safe and sound and how happy we are to be here! It was not an easy day but whoever said 'easy' was the funnest way to go. My prayers from the get-go were as follows: Safe Travels, Timely flights, that ALL my luggage would make it, and that the kids would be great and that God would give us favor with whomever we needed so that everything would go smoothly. Ironically, nothing happened like I had wanted or expected it to but God answered ever single request with an affirmative "yes" but went about it completely differently than I would have imagined. It all began when we got a call Friday morning as we were literally walking out the door at 9:30am for the airport that our Delta flight from Atlanta to Newark was delayed by what ended up being 4 hours because of bad weather in Newark. We decided to head on to the airport where we checked our bags and managed to miraculously get out of paying overage charges for 5 out of 6 "Heavy" bags as well as extra bags since they didn't consider Clark's military "Orders" my "Orders which meant we surpassed the suitcase allotment. We then headed to our gate which we realized once going through security and walking to the very other end of the Atlanta airport that our flight was further delayed and had moved to again another further away part of the airport. So here we went, me, my mom, Liam, Natalie, 2 large car seats, one stroller, one rolling carry-on suitcase, a duffle bag, 2 purses and 2 kids' backpacks and two kids in tow. Yikes! We looked like the most ridiculous pack-mules. It was painful but hilarious at the same time. Y'all know I don't know how to travel light. So once we got on our Newark flight we were certain we would miss our connection to London because our flight was to land 1 hour after the other took off. We land in hopes that maybe we'll get on the later flight out that night but once we deplaned there was a lawyer gentleman guy who I guess saw how ridiculous we looked and he literally helped us cart all our stuff to the other side of Newark's airport in hopes to get us on a good flight that night and not allow us to be stuck in NJ for the night. We quickly learn at the counter that our 6:30pm flight has not taken off but does so in 17 minutes-yes, 17 minutes. Some lady directs us to the first class check in and the man who I'm expecting to say, "good luck, try again later." Says with out me saying hardly anything, 'Come with me'. He then proceeds to take us to the front of security says, "Run to your gate I'm going to have them hold your flight." We run (a good 5 min run) and arrive out of breath and they say, "Are you the Childers...get on!" As the lady is checking our passports, I turn and see these 2 men (angels)standing there in airport uniforms. They say to me out of the blue, "are you from Atlanta and did you have 6 bags?" I said, "Yes, sir, why?" He said, "because we just put all 6 on this flight." My mouth dropped and I said, "But we JUST got off our flight like 8 minutes ago." He said, "Yes, we're good." I was amazed. I turned around and they were gone. We have a wonderful and uneventful flight into London. We land and get our pack-mule set up going and as we are getting in line for customs (which is no less than 250 people deep), a gentleman comes up and says, "Hey, come follow me." He takes us around past all the people to the front and as I walk past these people embarrassed, he hollers out loudly, "Coming through, celebrities coming through." I was SOOOOO embarrased and wanted to hide but what can you do when you are toting all that stuff and trying to catch up with the customs agent. We swiftly get through customs and go to get our luggage. We end up now not only with our pack-mule items, but also now TWO seperate "suitcase rolly-things." So tell me "How are we (me and my mom going to now push THREE giant things. A wonderful man who had worked there 30 years sees us from afar and without us even saying a word or looking in his direction he marches over and proceeds to take 2 of the carts and says, I will help you get to your husband. And so he does! So how about that for a whirlwind of a day. It was so stressful I can not even begin to tell you how I felt all day but in the end I realized how good God is and he wanted to show me that He can make anything happen even in the midst of chaos. One last story...maybe the best. Clark picks us up at the airport but we have to drive both our new truck and his work rental car home (long story later) so he says, "Come on honey, you can do it, your not tired and you can drive on the other side of the road,... a stick right" "Yeah right! Is what I'm thinking." I reluctantly accept the offer knowing somebody has to now make this long trek back to our house. Well not sooner than 10 minutes down the road does Clark loose me on a round-a-bout and whooosh he is out of sight and my mom and I are L.O.S.T. in England, driving a crazy car, in a crazy place AND my cell phone doesn't work because I forgot to have AT&T allow me to make calls once I arrived here. So we proceed on knowing that there is nothing I can do about it but drive and just hope I can kind of remember roughly how to go these remaining 200 miles. About 30 minutes down the road, their beside me rides up my sweet darling husband who had waited for us who knows back where and now had been going 100 mph realizing we were up ahead. What a ZOO! So our first day in England has been a busy but memorable one and you can see why I must get some shut-eye. I love you all dearly! ZZZzzz, Cindy