On our way to The Relevant Conference… with just a few bumps in the road!

Have you noticed I’ve been a little MIA the past two days? I cannot even begin to describe the craziness that the last 36 hours of my life has held. Whew!

It included two nights of little sleep as Silas was up with a bad cold. The cold got worse yesterday and I was really concerned with his breathing so I ended up taking him into Urgent Care. I’m so glad that I did as his oxygen levels were quite low and they gave him a breathing treatment almost immediately. He had signs of RSV, but, gratefully, the tests came back negative.

Silas, Jesse and I were planning to leave early this morning for The Relevant Conference, but with how sick Silas was acting, I didn’t think it was going to be possible — and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do as I was slated to be one of the keynote speakers plus speak on three other panels.

Amazingly, Silas perked up a great deal after the breathing treatment, so the doctor thought it would be completely okay for us to go — provided we brought along a nebulizer and some other medications in case Silas had another episode.

So we went home and hurriedly finished putting everything together in order to leave bright and early this morning. We made it through security and on our flight, with just a few minutes to spare and we’re pretty happy with how things were going after all the events of yesterday.

But then, they had us all get off the plane because there were technical issues.

Uh-oh! Not a good sign!

We all had to trek back down to the ticket desk and get moved to different flights and then go back through security again (which is no small feat when traveling with children!).

They boarded the plan and then we ended up having to sit there for 30 minutes while the pilot filled out paperwork. And then we had to sit there some more because they forgot to fuel the plane.

We finally got off the ground and things were going pretty well, but on our way down, Silas had a dirty diaper which leaked on him and me and we had to stand and wait and wait and wait to get off the plane because of some miscommunication issue between our plane and the guys on the ground. All the while the plane continued to wreak more and more of dirty diaper smells!

Once we finally were allowed to exit the plane, I headed straight for the bathrooms to clean up Silas and myself. It ended up being worse than I thought and I had to wash my jacket in the bathroom sink with soap and water (I had brought a change of clothes for Silas but not for me! I thought we were past the days of diaper blowouts!)

When I came back out of the bathroom to find Jesse, he met me with the news that our flight to Harrisburg was full and they soonest they could get us on a flight was 7 p.m.

There was only one slight problem with that… I was supposed to be giving a keynote talk at 6:30 p.m. at Relevant.

I just prayed and asked the Lord to please work out the details and then we walked what seemed like a few miles to the customer service desk. I was overjoyed and relieved when they told us that the initial information was incorrect and they did have us scheduled for the afternoon flight — which would put us into Harrisburg right before the opening dinner at Relevant. God is good!

And now we’re hanging out at the Chicago airport, waiting for our flight to leave. Since we have a few hours to kill, I’ll be posting a bunch of updates on my blog — unless another unexpected catastrophe strikes!

By the way, I’m so thankful that Silas has done exceptionally well in the midst of all of this craziness and he seems to be feeling a lot better today! I’m so thankful as it is so hard for me to see my babies struggling.