Wednesday
James, Donna and Bethany came over to Mum and Dad's for dinner and to say goodbye.  I got pretty upset, so did Donna, James and Mike managed to hold it together but my Mum and Dad looked like they were struggling which was hard. 

We did a little more packing and case re-jigging after that to make sure we weren't running around like headless chickens on Friday.

 

Thursday
After breakfast with my folks we drove to Kirkcaldy to spend the night with Mike's folks.  We had a lovely dinner and Mike's Mum read the girls their bedtime stories one last time.  I was really starting to struggle with the goodbyes and felt really quite unwell so headed off to bed around 10.30pm.  I think Mike came upstairs around midnight.

 

Friday
We were up at 7am the next day and after breakfast, we got the kids showered and cleaned up our mess and all of a sudden it was 10am and time to leave.  We'd decided to leave at that time sharp to avoid a long drawn out goodbye and it seemed to work pretty well.  Jim and Moira were really good, not too many tears at all.

We got back to my Mum's for lunch and my sister Pam and her kids came over too.  We were all blethering fine but it was obvious there was a tension in the air.  My Dad even had a wee cry when I told him we were def getting a taxi (he had offered to drive us to the airport the day before).  Dad and Mike took all our cases (8 large cases & 3 small and a laptop bag) over to the Airport hotel at 2pm and we had a coffee when they got back and called the taxi.  It all went downhill for me from that point.  I felt that if my heart were to beat any faster or harder I'd actually have a heart attack, and I don't know how I managed not to throw up!!  That 20 minute wait for that taxi was possibly the hardest 20 minutes of my life.  When the taxi arrived, I could hardly speak.  Hugs all round and my parents and sister and we were all in tears.  As we got into the taxi all I could se were my Mum and Dad in tears and I still can't shake that image from my mind.  How could I do that to them?  On a slightly positive note, as I hugged my Dad he said we'll be over in 24 weeks, not that long :-).

We pulled away from the house and I was in bits.  Ellie said to me "why are you crying Mum?" and I told her I was just excited and she then told Becca "look at Mum Becca, she's REALLY excited".  Well, that put a bit of a smile on my face.  By the time we'd reached the hotel I was a little more composed but still felt like I had just been to a funeral.  We took the kids for a swim right away and that really helped us all relax.

 

Saturday
We had brekkie and another swim before heading to the airport.  We thought we had loads of time so I checked emails etc.  Before we knew it, the flight was open so we moved to the queue.  We were there within minutes of the desk opening and still managed to be at the back of the queue!!!  There was a huge group of people together who were travelling to JApan to teach English geting on our flight and their Japanese rep was hearding them all to the front of the two queues for our flight much to everyone's disgust.  Eventually, 30 mins before the flight was due to leave, a BMI person came and labelled up our cases as she was worried we'd not get checked in in time.  The thing about this is that, because of the rush caused by the queue chaos, she didn't even look at the wieght of our cases, they just all got thrown onto the belt at once, she didn't even look at our hand luggage which I'm sure was almost over it's weight limit.

As we got to the steps of the plane, the hostess told us we couldn't take our hand luggage on as it was too big for the overhead lockers.  Loads of people on the flight had to pu their bags in the hold too so thankfully it wasn't just us.  It was a teeny plane, 3 seats wide just.  We were almost 40 minutes late as the captain informed us that there were weight issues with the plane (eek, I know I shouldn't have gone to the Next sale lol).

 

I'd been doing ok that day until we started to move off.  I was really upset all over again and then we flew over Pam's house and I couldn't take my eyes off it.  Once we were up into the clouds I was OK though.  At this point I noticed Mike speaking to one of the stewards (we weren't sitting in the same row).  When she was gone Mike explained that as we'd taken off, he's seen at least 2 of our cases as well as about a dozen others still sitting on the tarmac!!!!  The stewardess was no use as she wasn't aware of any luggage being left behind but there was nothing we could do so we settled down for the flight to London.  As we approached London, we had fab views of the city which is a site I'll remember for a while, it looked lovely.

I was pretty stressed when we got to London as we had to retrieve our hand luggage and then get to Term 3 and we only had just over an hour left before the flight to Singapore.  But, we managed it.  The kids were fantastic at this point, they really were, we had to move pretty quickly but they didn't complain once.

At the gate, we called our Mum's to say where we were and no sooner had we had a bite of a roll, the flght was called and we were off to board.  Mike managed to speak to the dispatcher just before we boarded and she confirmed that indeed, 2 of our cases hadn't been brought from Edinburgh.  She told us to tell this to the Singapore Airline staff on arrival.

 

Well, there's nothing bad I can say about the flight to Singapore really.  The staff were lovely, the toilets were clean throughout the flight, the food was really great, possibly the best airline food I've had.  The seats were comfy enough and the entertainment was good. Becca watched Dora about 3 times and each time she had us in stitches as she shouted Swiper no Swiping at the screen at the top her voice.  Ellie loved that she could see Shrek again and she giggled away to herself.  We all stayed awake for about 3 hours til after dinner then tried to get to sleep.  Becca was asleep in minutes but it took Ellie a little longer.  Once she was out though she slept well.  Becca woke at one point and got upset and told me she wanted to go home.  I wasn't sure how to answer that one though - not too sure where home is right now!

In fact, the flight went so well that we hardly even looked at the books etc we'd packed into our hand luggage.  However, one thing I was glad to have was my moisturiser and Evian spray.  For the first time ever, I didn't suffer with the dry air as I was piling those onto my face.

We landed just about bang on time and got through Security etc really quickly.  We had to visit the SIA desk to report the missing bags but by the time we got there, they told Mike that the cases were already in Frankfurt and should be with us by tonight.

We got ourselves in to the Arrivals hall and our lift was waiting for us and we drove to our Hotel (The Orchard Hotel, Orchard Road).  We decided to have a stroll outside and grabbed a bite to eat and when we got back, we bathed the kids and washed the flight clothes.  We've all sitting watching High School Musical now, hoping to get to sleep soon so that we can kick off tomorrow on Signapore time and avoid too much jet lag.