Gee thanks, American Airlines.

I should preface this by saying, we made it home safely, hooray! We had a wonderful visit but there’s no place like home <clicks heels>!

After a three and a half hour drive through pockets of pouring rain and a quick lunch with one of Adam’s old school friends (thanks again Ameen!) we arrived at DFW. We dropped off our rental car with ease, caught a bus to the terminal, breezed through airport security and got to our gate with plenty of time to spare only to find our flight was delayed an hour. Not the end of the world, and nothing our super trooper, traveling toddler couldn’t handle. We ran down her battery as best we could and when they finally began boarding our flight we got her all strapped into her handy dandy traveling car seat and waited for the pre-boarding of people traveling with small children.

We waited, and waited and waited.

Not only did they never offer a pre-boarding option for people with small children we were the last group to board. The flight, thus the overhead compartments, was completely full and the boarding agent and flight attendants were rude and anything but helpful as we tried to squeeze our way to our seats with Lilia passed out in her car seat and find a place for our bags without completely stopping the flow of traffic through the aisle. Somehow she managed to sleep through it all and we finally got someone to help us find a place for our bags, though she was clearly put out.

It’s possible we may not have been so put off by the experience had we not just had such an enjoyable trip on our American Airlines flight from SFO to DFW last week. On that flight we were pre-boarded allowing us to get Lilia and ourselves settled without affecting other passengers boarding and thus were enabled to be the savvy, self sufficient parents traveling with toddlers flight attendants dream of. Still the flight attendants on that flight were sweet and attentive and I’m confident they would have given us a hand had we needed one.

So American, what’s up with that?