We arrived in Cherkassy safely yesterday evening. It was a pretty long flight. Naomi and Mishael did pretty well, but Noelle really didn’t enjoy flying and she let us know about it. She only slept for a total of about 40 mins on our flight from Seattle to Amsterdam. We were amazed at how she could stay awake. We had two seats by the window and two seats across the isle and up a half row. Christina and I both sat on the isle and we kept passing Noelle back and forth.
One good thing about the flight was that it had personal entertainment centers at every seat. You could choose from a dozen or more movies or tv shows. It also had games and you could send e-mails. Naomi and Mishael must have each watched about 3 or 4 cartoon movies during the flight. Unfortunately Noelle wasn’t really interested in the entertainment center. Her entertainment was having us walking her up and down the isles. She felt like she need to greet ever person we walked by.
Once we got to Amsterdam the kids were a little crazy. Christina and I sat down a little exhausted and the kids literally ran circles around us for about 20 mins. I think they were running on pure adrenaline by then. Finally, on our flight from Amsterdam to Kiev Noelle simply crashed. Whether she wanted to or not she just had to give in after 16 hours of being wide awake. Mishael and Naomi slept pretty well too.
When we got to Kiev it was like trying to wake the children out of a coma. We were sitting in the back so we were the very last people out of the plane. That usually means you will also be the last one to go through passport control and to get your luggage and go through customs.
The children were like zombies when we got to passport control. Mishael’s legs started to ache from a lack of sleep and he began crying and saying that he needed to go to the doctor. One of the passport control agents noticed our sad/tired looking family and moved us to the front of the line. With in about 2 mins we were through passport control. Our luggage appeared right away on the conveyer belt. I was now carrying both Mishael and Noelle, so we paid a porter to grab our luggage, all 7 checked bags plus 4 carry-ons. That worked out great because he just wheeled us right through customs no questions asked and no line to wait in either!
