Travel Plans

So, today, Devin and I made the plunge...we turned in all the info needed to get approval for the travel to the US in November! Woohoo! THEN, we went and set up our itinerary with the travel guy! What a crazy long trip this is going to be!!! Has anyone ever traveled a lot with two little kids?? Now, I used to think I was pretty pro with traveling...but I've never encountered this before. I admit, that I was pretty nervous about the idea of traveling by myself with a 4 year old and a 2 year old. Now, today after actually seeing the amount of time we're going to be spending on these silly airplanes, I'm FRANTIC!!! Our first leg goes from here to Zurich. Cool. Switzerland! It's an 8 1/2 hour flight overnight. Oh boy. We have a 6-ish hour layover there, which I'm not at all worried about because I hear they have a fantastic children's play area (including a place with beds and cribs), which I plan to take full advantage of!!! Then, we fly from Zurich to Chicago...which is 10 hours! Holy cow! That one, unfortunately, is during the day! Ok...so we get to Chicago, and we get to stay that night in a hotel...that aught to be interesting! Then the next morning, we leave for Salt Lake; a nice 3 1/2 hour flight with a 4 hour layover, then the last 1 hour flight to Idaho Falls...and we're there. That's 23 hours IN THE AIR not counting layovers... Sigh. I'm tired already. So, my question here is, does anyone have any good ideas for a lot of long plane trips all in 2 days to keep 2 little kiddies busy and happy? (ha ha ha ha ha ha hah ah ah a hah aha ha) Any advice would be helpful. I'm going to try to pack as lightly as possible because I HATE airport security, on top of the fact that I'm going to have to carry around ALL of my bags in Zurich AND Chicago, so the idea of 'less is more' works here. But if anyone has any ideas of anything that has worked for them, let me know!!!

Another thing that really surprised me was the cost. I knew it was expensive, but this was even more expensive than I had originally thought! Whew!! It's well over $5,000 just for me--ONE WAY. Each child is almost $4,000 a piece EACH WAY. So just for me and Andrew and Claire to fly to the US and back will be around $26,000. Josh and Devin will follow later in December and add another $18,000 to the round trip ticket. Oh, and we can't forget Jr. who gets a seat on the way home, too...so there's another $4,000, making it an even $48,000 for our family to fly to the US and back to Cameroon. Can we say ridiculous? And this is COACH!!!! Come on people, for that much I think we should at least get business class, don't you???? Well, I suppose this is why we don't get to go visit very often! :P I remember being completely upset trying to find airplane tickets from Pennsylvania or Washington D.C. to the west... If we weren't able to shop sales, it would have cost us something like $1500 or even $2000 for our whole family to fly! Sounds pretty good to me now!