Our flight and arrival

Well, who’d have thunk that my first post in the Holy Land would be written while sitting at Shaarei Tzedek hospital…but I am not going to get ahead of myself, so let’s see….

Our flight was really not too bad, sorry to disappoint those that were expecting some good laughs from hearing all about it! The kids were so excited about finally reaching this point, that once we got on the plane, and got everyone settled into our whole row, the rest was kind of easy. Little Red was on the hard side, lots of crying, and not so much sleeping, but there were none of the epic disasters that we had both predicted. When Little Red was awfully cranky ,  we noticed an oncoming staph infection on his leg which is not uncommon in this family. I was even prepared with the typical antibiotics and had started him on meds on Sat. night. He was uncomfortable and kvetchy on the plane, and had a hard time falling asleep, but once he did, was out like a light for a good 4 hours or so, BH!!

The hard part of the flight was getting off and locating all of our pieces of luggage. The little guy who flew with us to meet his grandfather was adorable beyond belief, and helped us with locating and finding all of our bags. We loaded up onto FOUR luggage carts, and were the last ones out into the real world!

Our welcome home was beautiful. TPH’s parents, aunt and grandmother made the trip to the airport (and it was 7am, no less!) to greet us with balloons, food, drinks, and 2 fourteen passenger vans to get us home. The first thing that put a smile on our faces was this, and looking very touristy we had to stop and take a picture.

***Picture coming soon...

The kids loved getting into the big vans that had “Imma! Jewish music playing!” On the 35 min drive to our apartment, 4/6 kids were snoring loudly, as most of them had not slept a wink on the plane. So there me and BAW are, loudly exclaiming to the kids about our surroundings and trying to show them things when they were all sound asleep. First note to self about Aliyah: Things don’t quite go as you imagined them when you have kids.