Pre-flight prep

My alarm went off at 5:30 this morning. I climbed over the two boys sleeping between the clock and me to hit the snooze.

5:39am. I crawled over the still-sleeping kids, hit the snooze again.

5:48am. I got out of the bed and walked around to turn off the alarm and enied myself any thoughts of the flight that the morning would hold. I hopped in the shower and shaved my legs. I didn’t want any hair standing on end before I even got to the Gary Jet Center. Once out of the shower, I wondered, “Hmmm…what does one wear when going 3Gs?”

By this point, Robbie had woken up. From the bathroom, he called to me. “Mom, so how do you feel about going in an airplane that will be upside down?”

“Oh, I’m excited,” I said. And I was. But I was also trying not to think about it at all.

“You might get sick,” Robbie offered.

“I hope not.”

“Mom, I will get you a trash can if you do throw up.” It’s this kind of sweetness that has saved his life on more than one occasion.

Just as I was putting on a pair of khaki shorts and my favorite white shirt, Annie yelled from her bedroom, “Don’t wear white!”

“Why not?”

“Because if you throw up, it will ruin the shirt!”

“Great,” I thought as I searched for a more puke-proof shirt, digging through the pile of clean clothes on my bedroom floor that haven’t quite made it into the drawer yet.

Suitably dressed in a cranberry-colored t-shirt and black shorts, I went downstairs to eat breakfast.

“Mom, just think,” said Charlie while he was waiting on his peanut butter toast, “you’re going to be up in a little airplane and they are going to flip you over. You are SO going to get sick!”

That’s when I had to lay down the first rule of the morning. Nobody was allowed to say anything about anything that might go wrong on my flight. I didn’t want to hear any more about throwing up or rolling over or peeing my pants. Happily, everyone obliged my request.

The drive to Gary went pretty quickly. We stopped for a little caffeine, though I was so conscious of keeping my stomach relatively empty that I only drank about ¼ of my morning-ritual Diet Coke. Before I knew it, we were driving through Gary. Past the urban baseball stadium where the Gary Rail Cats play. Past the courthouse. And directly to the Gary Jet Center where 12 stunt planes sat innocently parked on the tarmac, just down from a half-dozen U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds jets.

Since we’d driven two and a half hours to get there, I guessed there was no backing out of this flight now. Stay tuned…