A word of warning

Here is a story that I have told a few more times that I wanted to, and I was so tired of it by the time we got home from our Christmas travel, I didn't want to put it in here.
But today, I was purchasing plane tickets again, and felt the urge to share this sort of cautionary tale for anybody who might be reading and also considering naming offspring after yourself.

As I have explained before, Jon travelled to his native country with our three sons on December 17 or so, and I travelled with our three daughters and my niece just a few hours later.
The boys went directly to Oslo, but the girls and I had an extended layover in London.
As far as that London stay goes, it was fun and exhausting.
The only really dark spot was that we stayed at the one of the three Holiday Inns just there at the airport, and I must warn one and all that that hotel is not to be gone near under any circumstances, as the management is frightening and only occassionally honest. If you want to hear more, ask me someplace else, as anything else I would say about them might be considered libel.

But that's not what I'm cautioning you about. The caution is in regards to flying accompanied by children who bear your same name. My daughter Helen and I have the same first and last names on our passports. Happily, our middle initials and birthdates are entirely different.
When I have purchased tickets for us in the past, the middle initial has been sufficient to keep us from getting into any messes with airlines.
Not this time!

This time, someone at Scandinavian Air Service, or perhaps Air Canada, or maybe even Lufthansa, United or Air France (as we were dealing with the entire Star Alliance...) looked at our reservation and concluded that two Helen Weens were too many, and so they deleted one of us.
Sometimes the deleted one was me, and on some flights it was 9yo Helen. Either way, it set us up for a minimum of two hours of sorting out the mess at each and every airport.
In each airport, that is all five, we stood in one line and then another, were told we must purchase another ticket a few times.
In each case, I produced an alarming amount of documentation to demonstrate that I had paid for us all.
Then the frowning face behind the desk turned toward the computer screen in silence and tapped out secret codes for 45 minutes or so, made phone calls, snorted and shook it's head from time to time in frustration, smiled up at me now and then, and ultimately handed us boarding passes just in time for an invigorating sprint for the gate, as the agent called out behind me that we must repeat the process at the next airport.....because they could only fix the ticket for that one flight in the time allowed.

The wonderful bit is that we never missed a flight. Though we were last on the plane twice, and our baggage had to be re-loaded on the plane for those.

I totalled up the amount of time spent extracting these tickets and boarding passes from various airlines, and I think it was eleven hours.
My favorite response came from a Swedish woman at SAS who declared "What a pity this is, to spend your morning here when you might have fed that unhappy baby breakfast." All present agreed heartily.

So, if you want to name your baby after yourself, just be prepared when you travel. Print out every e-mailed confirmation, and bring your credit card statement.