Forever Friday

Yesterday lasted 36 hours.  Apparently even that wasn't enough to get us home. 

We left Hong Kong a bit late, but still comfortably within target range, perhaps 40 minutes late.  The flight was 12 hours, 10 minutes.  Suffice it to say that Eli does not understand airplanes.  He doesn't like books or movies, and he does like running around and getting into things and throwing them around.  He slept for all of 3 hours on the flight, so Allison and I had our hands full. 

We landed in San Francisco 2 hours before we left Hong Kong.  This time warp was about to become the least strange thing about our day.

Everyone from our adoption agency, to the U.S. Consulate, to our fellow adoptive families, to our paperwork, told us that on entry to the U.S. we could go to absolutely any station at the passport control center to process Eli's paperwork and confirm him as a U.S. citizen.  So we got in a long line for U.S. citizens and snaked our way round to the front finally, got checked in by the Homeland Security guy, and then got sent to a special line for "New Immigrants" for special processing.  This line was being served by one agent, an unhappy man named Mr. Ng.  Poor Mr. Ng did not seem up to his job, which at the time consisted of processing a family of about 10 Thai or Filipino immigrants, only one of whom spoke English.  We got behind these new immigrants and waited.  One at a time, they went up to get their digital fingerprints taken, answer questions, have their picutres taken, and then were put back in line.

We got called up, at which point Mr. Ng said that we were already checked in for processing, and had to get back in line, again behind our new Asian immigrant friends.

We waited.  Two more adoptive families joined us in line.  The Thais/Filipinos now got ink fingerprints taken, then chatted with more agents, etc.  Several times we were told that soon all other passengers would have been served and we could then move to another line, but this kept not happening.  An hour or so later, we finally got our agent.  Processing Eli's paperwork took 2 minutes.

Now we ran to catch our Chicago connection and made it.  Eli slept all 4 hours, 12 minutes of that one.

Again we ran. this time to catch our Burlington connection.  At this point, it had been Friday for 31 hours.  We boarded the plane, taxied around O'Hare for 45 minutes, then were told that our flight had been cancelled and we had to return to the gate.  Apparently there's construction going on at night at Burlington airport.  They close the airport at 11:30 p.m., and if a flight can't take off in time to make it to the airport by this time, the flight gets cancelled.  We burned up our margin taxiing around the tarmac.

No good flights for Saturday, so we got a flight on Sunday morning.

My lovely parents, delighted with this twist of fate and their resulting opportunity to spend a full day with their new grandson, picked us up at the airport at 10:30 p.m. (length of day 34.5 hours and counting).  We got back to their place and Eli ran around until 2:00 a.m. and finally fell asleep.

We inadvertently slipped through a crack in time, and now exist in a kind of ephemeral twilight state.  The jet lag makes us like wraiths, insubstantial, only loosely tethered to the earth.  Yesterday lasted forever, and we never got where we were going.  Today is slightly unreal, and home is like a dream.

Eli is great.  We are breaking all the rules -- introducing him to crowds of people, frenetic activity, new and strange places.  He seems to thrive on it.  We'll see.