Our mission, which we chose to accept, was to fly with two young children, Eden aged 30 months and Alden aged 9 months, over the ocean to the mystical land of New Zealand. First we arrived at Salt Lake City airport only to discover an hour and a half delay of our flights. We touched down in LA and played follow the leader and hopping games while waiting four hours for our next flight.

We discovered we were waiting at the wrong gate and rushed to find our correct connecting flight. Elisa is being nice. We were told by the gate crew to wait at that gate. They just hadn’t bothered to tell us about the other flight to Australia that was actually ours. Then we took a red eye 15-hour flight to Sydney, Australia. The plane had the personalized movie service, just like I wanted. I was kind of excited to catch up on movies. We cramped ourselves in for a good night sleep. Eden saw a couple shows and then went to bed like a pro.

The final leg in our journey touched us down in Wellington, New Zealand after a total of 32 hours of traveling. On the one hand, we’re so blessed that you can travel all the way around the world in only 32 hours. On the other hand, how is it fair that the guy in front of us in security had left Salt Lake 8 hours after we did? We keep telling ourselves that our tickets were tons cheaper. As payment we were received by Katheryn Ostler and her two kids, Ben and Sam. Cheers! Eden was so excited to see them. Of course, she was strung out from exhaustion anyway. But she had been talking about Sam for months.