So now Lauren and I have our boarding pass. My mom brought Lauren to the bathroom, trying to get her to go poop before boarding. The care-taker we hired for Lauren first introduced the practice to us. Basically, the process goes like this. I hold her legs with my hands and let part of her left butt-cheek rest on my my left leg over the toilet bowl. Then I basically make funny noises like grunting to get her to poop. I understand it’s been practiced in China for quite awhile because they didn’t have paper diapers so regular pooping is a necessity.
Anyway, Lauren is used to being held to have her bowel movement, and she’s quite regular on the timing. You probably wonder why I brought this up, and you’ll see later.
The next hurdle is the actual security check-point. It was difficult even for me to go through the security check-point, much less with Lauren. I brought Lauren to the security-checkpoint, and everyone said teary good-byes.
I dutifully put all Lauren’s food inside a quart-size plastic bag as instructed. The first problem when I approached the check-point was that they officer told me to put the stroller through the X-ray machine as well. The stroller I have can not be folded with only one hand. After looking around, I had no choice but put Lauren next to me on the floor, she’s actually sitting quite well, so that’s not a worry. She just sat there and looked around while I folded the stroller. I carried Lauren through the metal detector with no problems. Well, I then needed to put Lauren back into her stroller, and I really didn’t want to leave her on the floor again. Just when I was trying to figure out my options, a lady behind me kindly offered to hold Lauren while I unfold the stroller. With a sigh of relief, I did exactly that. I came to realize that I needed to depend on the kindness of strangers on this journey, which was a completely new experience for me.
I pushed the stroller and my carry-on luggage with me to the gate, which is one level down, so I had to find the elevator. I then waited in line at the gate counter trying to find out how the gate-checking of stroller works. It turned to another 30 minutes wait in line because there was only one lady behind the counter and about 40 people in line.
The CSR lady turned out to be real nice. She explained to me the gate-check process, and actually got the gentleman who can actually does the gate-check to give me the forms to fill out.
To be continued.