Coping With Being Stranded

My wife and I were among the thousands who were left stranded by the big blizzard in the NE. Our flight was scheduled to leave on Tuesday Dec. 28th. At bed time on Monday the flight was still scheduled. We awoke on Tuesday, packed and ready only to receive an e-mail from JetBlue that our flight had been cancelled. That began a plethora of phone calls to JetBlue trying to get arrangements made for getting back to Florida. 20-30 of those calls ended with a recorded message telling us that phone traffic was very heavy and that we should call again. The call was then terminated. Finally I was placed on hold and after 1 hour and 5 minutes got to speak with a live person. The earliest flights available, I was told, were on Saturday. We grabbed those reservations and began to make adjustments for an extended stay.

We have been at our daughter, son-in-law and 4 grandkid's since December 21. We were to leave on the 28th and the other set of in-laws were to arrive on the same day. Now we had to make arrangements for 2 sets of grandparents at the same time. We re-located from the basement bed/play room to the pull-out sofa in the living room. In the meantime I managed to come down with some kind of cold/flu thing complete with achy body, sore throat and congestion. We've made a couple of forays to local malls just to give the kids (ages 5-11) some room to move around, and the adults an opportunity to check out the post-Christmas sales. The kids have also enjoyed playing in the gradually shrinking 15 inches of snow while the adults have come up with excuses to stay indoors. We've also enjoyed bowls of "snow-cream" which my wife made from snow we caught in large bowls as it fell (hopefully the atmosphere is clean).

While all of this is going on, my daughter goes for daily radiation treatments. So far we have not had any melt-downs. We're learning to dodge the 3 remote controlled helicopters and one remote controlled car that are whizzing around. The kids have watched the "Despicable Me" video about 6-8 times. Oh yes, yesterday a family of five dropped by for a visit, so we had eight adults and seven kids scattered throughout the house.

Two and a half days to go. Hopefully our creativity in keeping everyone occupied and happy will stretch that long.