So, what exactly does " confirmed seats" mean?

Grandma and Grandpa left Tuesday the day after we returned from our trip, and they arrived home safely and with no stand-by problems. It was time for us to get ready for our week-long trip home to Atlanta and the flight was the following day, this past Wednesday. The evening before, David said, after sitting at the computer, "Well, the flight looks good tomorrow." Looks good? I replied, "Why does it matter how the flight looks? We have confirmed seats." We had indeed received an e-mail from Lufthansa with our seat assignments, so why was David checking on seat availability for our flight? His surprising answer was, "Well, they can always take us off the flight if a paying passenger needs a seat."

What?!!! I didn't know that. This is really just one step up from stand by and you all know how I feel about flying stand by, particularly with 4 kids.

It was with no small amount of trepidation that we loaded the family into a taxi the next morning and checked our luggage in at the counter. The agent didn't have much to tell us, but when we checked in at the gate, the agent there right away said, "I need to tell you right now that we are probably going to need to take you all off this flight....blah, blah blah. Overbooked, paying passengers, blah, blah, blah."

Just great. The kids were in tears as we exited the airport, took a taxi back home and did the walk of shame back into our house. We had said goodbye to several of our neighbors just a few hours before and felt a little sheepish explaining why we were back.

Once back home, I had to tell James that I could understand that he was upset, but that his moaning and groaning was getting to be annoying and I didn't want to hear it anymore.

The next thing I knew, James was sitting the table eating lunch with this note taped to his shirt. I guess this way, I didn't have to "hear" it anymore.

A half hour later, he turned it over and wrote this new note. We all felt the same way.

The next morning, David said the flight looked much better, so off we went yet again to the airport. Imagine our surprise when we went to check in and were told that Lufthansa had switched this flight to a smaller aircraft and they could tell us right away that we weren't getting on. The flights the next day didn't look good. So, we decided to try the Washington flight. We could always then catch one of the many flights down to Atlanta.

We were pleasantly surprised that we got on the Washington flight, and in Business Class to boot. Immediately upon landing, David checked on the flights to Atlanta and it looked hopeless. Rather than getting a hotel room and trying tomorrow and risk losing yet another day trying to get home, we opted to rent a van and drive the 11 hours down to Atlanta.

At least our kids were used to driving 12 or 13 hours for trips to visit family, so it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to drive 5 hours, spend the night at a motel and drive 6 more hours the next morning after spending 9 hours flying across the Atlantic. And no one complained that they didn't have a DVD player to occupy them during the drive. They were too excited to finally be just hours away from seeing their friends.