Wednesday, June 2, 2010 | By: Slacker Mom

Yes, Mother, I Am In Fact Brain Dead

My mom asked me that question yesterday when I informed her that CJ had missed his flight to Texas. Now a missed flight does happen to people on a rare occasion but she knows all too well that this type of thing happens on a regular basis with us.

Usually I am the main offender. I'm the one who always flakes out on very important appointments or locks my keys in my car. I have to hand out spare keys to my relatives like they're candy just so I'll have someone to call on to rescue me. I pulled into a parking lot one day and my kids said, "Hey, this is where you locked your keys in your car!" The last time it happened, they all said in unison, "Again?!"

Things like this just have a way of happening to me. Like the time I closed the back door of my wagon and managed to get my fingers caught in it...at night...while pregnant...and no one inside the house could hear me yelling. Or the time I was babysitting and I locked the baby in the car and had to call the police to rescue us. (No, I never told the mom. You're all wondering now, aren't you?)

Missed flights are such a common occurrence that all I can do when it happens is laugh. On our recent trip to Vegas, we couldn't find wi-fi to confirm our itinerary but I knew that our flight left at 12:15 in the afternoon from L.A. So we made our plans, drove our rental car back to L.A. and got to the airport in plenty of time. Only the ticket agent couldn't find us in the system. It turned out that we were supposed to arrive in Seattle at 12:15. I, of course, started laughing. Thankfully, the agent was really nice and super helpful and we made it back home that night.

Yesterday's incident I refuse to take blame for since I had nothing to do with booking the ticket. CJ did all that himself and we knew his flight left at 7:55am on Wednesday(today). He asked if I could check him in online. I tried but it wouldn't work. I double checked everything and tried again--still no luck. That's when I saw the date. He was supposed to fly out yesterday morning at 7:55am. He'd missed his flight by about 5 hours. After some serious scrambling, we finally got him to the airport around 4pm where we were informed there were no more flights going out. He would have to come back in the morning for the 7:55 flight we thought he was booked on originally.

He made that flight with no problem and hopefully will make it home in 2 weeks without incident. However, considering that he is flying to Texas every month now and the whole family is flying in August, I have no doubt that we will find ourselves in the airport once again laughing at our stupidity while the ticket agent just stands there looking in bewilderment at the two idiots who missed their flight.