Which sounds like a decent reason to miss the cruise, but the flu is just an odd coincidence. The reason we're not on the cruise is because we couldn't find Clara's certified birth certificate. I still can't believe that's true. I'm not the type of person who loses things like that. I'm also not the type of person to wait until 8 pm the night before a 7 am flight to gather together anything I absolutely need before leaving. But, that's the way it happened.
"Do you have any idea where it might be?" my Dad asked the next morning, speaking as someone who had not spent three hours the previous night tearing the house apart. It's not as if we have lots of papers lying around. We can only guess it went out with the recycling at some point.
Our first thought was to figure out how to get a new document down there. We knew Lexington could turn one around quickly, but catching a later flight wouldn't get us there on time, and even FedEx same-day delivery wouldn't arrive on time. So we figured if we showed up, they might just let us on (would they really turn away a two-year-old?). The town could fax down a copy in the morning, and we gathered some supporting documentation as well (medical records, baptism certificate, etc...).
But after talking to a second employee of Carnival, who ever so sympathetically(!) assured us that not only would they never allow us to board but they would only refund to us the taxes on the vacation, we decided that Clara and I should just stay home. I really didn't want to fly to Houston, drive to Galveston, and then be turned away. What then?
So we re-packed the bags, called a car so we didn't need to get Clara up at 5 am, and went to bed very late. Poor Bridges slept just a few hours, and when the car came, Clara woke up anyway and was, of course, heartbroken at the news.
"I want to go on the cruise, I want to go on the cruise," she cried. How do you explain to a two-year-old why she isn't being allowed to go when you've been getting her excited about it all week long? Even though I knew she would get over it, it was heartbreaking.
Yesterday she asked for Lee and Daddy numerous times.
"Are they almost home?" she'd ask.
But here she is, sick with a flu, so perhaps there's a reason for everything.
It turns out that Bridges had some additional stress on the way down. He realized that he didn't have a notarized letter from me stating he could bring Lee out of the country, something that is necessary for international travel when one parent travels with children. So he spent several hours wondering if he and Lee would be turned away. But since Lee was technically in a stateroom with her aunt, she checked in with her and in then end it was a non-issue.
And, this morning, Bridges just told me that Lee woke up not feeling well and won't even get out of bed. So he's with her, and I'm sure he'd rather be home than in some tiny stateroom with a sick child.
Ugh....
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