Prepare and fly

I was to start from home on a Sunday evening, spend Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and the morning half of Thursday at work and fly out on Thursday afternoon.I had it planned in my head. I would meal prep for the 4 nights I would be away. The kids have cereal for breakfast and their lunches are at school. It was only the dinner I had to care about. My plan was pasta for one night for which I would make the sauce, paneer curry for one night and chicken for the 3rd. K could take care of the carb component by making the pasta, roti or rice. Wednesday evenings Pumpki has swimming lessons in the evening. So after the lesson the trio could have some dinner at the swimming centre.The only issue was I needed K to complete the grocery shopping so that I could proceed with meal prep. Seeing this plan, K was of the opinion that I was over reacting and over preparing. I said  wanted to ensure that the kids’ meals were taken care of. K claimed he was perfectly capable of doing it. I asked how. He said by buying stuff duh! I said that’s preposterous since I was more than willing to make the food with fresh and known ingredients. (You get the drift how this is going) This extended into a long drawn argument about how much was too much and I was being self-sacrificial while he was being flippant. Eod he did get the stuff I asked for and I did meal prep as I intended ;) :D 

 In other news, Pumpki was crying her eyes out nearly every night leading to my departure. She anticipated that she was going to miss me a lot and could not fathom being away from me. It was saddening but I also felt it was something she had to experience. Chiyaa being older was way more composed. But come Sunday afternoon, she started being a little clingy. She made some cards and origami art work for me. She didn’t cry but came to me and hugged me tight and said ‘I wish I could cry like Pumpki.’ I reassured her that there was no need to cry since she was a capable independent girl. She would be so busy over the days that she would barely notice me missing. But her words made me well up. It surely was a different and somewhat difficult time for both the kids. I gave them the example of when my sister and I were little and my mom used to work in a different city from us. We did not even have the luxury of video calls or WhatsApp in those days. But it eventually became fine. This was only going to be 4 days. It would pass in a jiffy.

Sunday evening, as the time for my departure to the airport drew closer, I allowed them to have some screen time so that they would be distracted. They were engaged on the tv and wished them goodbye and left. Their eyes looked sad but they were eventually ok as K attested :) 
I was undertaking the trip with a bunch of people I work with and also get along with. I don’t like spending time with people from work. I was wary of how this trip was going to be since I had to spend considerable time with folks from work and also spend considerable time at an office setting. I was assured that the office setting was quite cool. People who had been there from Leeds claimed that they used to go for a stroll and go around exploring whenever they felt like and there were no questions asked. I wanted to avail the opportunity but I wasn’t sure how chilled out everything would be. But we would cross the bridge when we get there. At the airport we got together near the check in counters and then it felt like any other travel. There was the usual kerfuffle  of checking passports, boarding passes and the whole nine yards. Formalities done, we now had a long wait for a flight. The flight was scheduled for 2230 UK time and to reach Romania at 0330 the next morning. It would be nerve wracking to get to work the next day. Everyone was strategising how to get through the next day. It was nice for people to just chat around with their guard down. I was particularly close to one of my team mates Michelle. We spent quite some time having heart to heart conversations about things from work and outside. 

It was a late night flight and we were zombies by the time we touched down. We went through immigration which took a while for us. For some reason they were a bit snarky towards British passport holders ;) After that we made our way to  made our way to the luggage carousel. We all got our luggages. Michelle’s was now where to be seen! There was one suitcase that was left behind as well. We guessed that someone must have picked hers up instead of their own and made their way with it. We got in touch with one of the airport authorities about it. He took us to a room where he asked us to note an email id and phone number to get in touch with lost luggages. After that he escorted us out quite unceremoniously. We had no way of getting and nothing else to do but head to the hotel. Michelle got some spare stuff from the reception desk at the hotel. 

I hit the bed with absolutely no idea what was in store tomorrow.