Hell. Oh.

Welcome to San Jose Airport, a nice enough airport when traveling alone (hey, free wifi that actually works goes a long way with me), but a waking nightmare with one cool oasis (again, free wifi) when one is sick with a cold and traveling with two very healthy, very active children.

Now, my two darlings are very polite, extremely well-behaved kids. Most of the time. They are very courteous, use their manners well, and generally get along well with just about everybody. Put them on a plane when they're relatively tired, and they'll peacefully listen to my iPod and stay quiet. Put them on an airplane early in the afternoon after a twenty-minute nap, and they turn into two noisy little slap-boxers with insatiable appetites and the urge to pee every two minutes during takeoff and landing, and every ten minutes while camped out at the gate.

So, take two hyper preschoolers-going-on-schoolers, factor in the lack of sleep and excitement of travelling by AIWERPWANE, and multiply that by having to walk across a crowded terminal packing a stuffed laptop bag, a camera, a purse, three jackets (it's hot in San Diego, but rather cold still in Portland), a bag of food, a couple of drinks, and one small hand trying to tug you in eight directions at once, none of them in the direction you're actually trying to go, and to all that add in sinuses that burn with the brimstone promises of a thousand Baptist preachers that is simultaneously leaking like a busted fire hydrant and two very sore ears, and on top of all that add in the disgusted looks of a million people who are better parents than me while mysteriously absent of any wee hangers-on.

Of course, they're totally mocking me right this minute by playing nicely with the toy monster truck that my son got at Burger King, both of them wearing the paper crowns symbolic of that magic Burger Kingdom. For some reason, I want to shake them both and cry out for them to meet my lowered expectations. That would be foolish, though. We still have one more flight to go, and a car ride home after that... and their bedtime is in an hour and a half.

At least we're back in our own beds tonight.