We left Iceland several days ago. I had been carrying so much anxiety about our long flight home. I’ve dreaded that flight since the day we booked it last summer. It just seemed impossible that we could get through such a long chunk of time without really struggling with Jude. And struggle we did, for eight hours. But we’re on the other side of it now. The big kids entertained themselves with a month’s worth of screen time and never slept even though their normal bedtime happened about halfway through all those hours of flight. Jude was very difficult to entertain. He missed his nap that day because of the timing of heading to the airport. He conked out for maybe 45 minutes early on during the flight and was finally tired enough to sleep quite soundly for the last hour. He screamed plenty, proudly demonstrated his willful personality, charmed zero adults around us, and was generally a pain. But as my mom says, we’ll never see any of the people in the seats around us again. We will likely remember them for the colds they must have given us, but time will tell on that.

We walked through the Seattle airport in a less zombie-like state than I had expected. We all felt so excited and thankful to be that much closer to home, and even though the kids didn’t have to deal with as much of the difficulty of being in a foreign country, they were obviously glad to be back in the USA too. I suppose they probably pick up on plenty of our stress and anxiety subconsciously.

After learning that Nic’s bag didn’t make it onto our flight as we had been told it would, we went to collect our rental car. It would have been much easier to fly home from Seattle, but we couldn’t make that work in an affordable way. Just on the short jaunt over to the rental car, Laila and I conversed with several random strangers, a feat not always as easily accomplished outside of our own home country. We’ve never been so happy to hear American accents and to look around at familiar things. Even if Nic and I haven’t spent much time in Seattle, every little thing about driving and picking up a few groceries was familiar and easy to navigate – what a relief!

Feeling so incredibly tired, we ate a quick snack and settled in to one last set of unfamiliar bedsheets. But in this case, one room’s bedding matched sheets we purchased at Target a few years ago – ah, familiarity!