The inflight entertainment system in the seats were great, though the only "kiddish" movie was "The Corpse Bride" on ours. Northwest has a better selection, usually, for kids. My 8 year old sat and watched all the cartoons, even the ones that were only in French. My 10 year old played game after game of chess. It really saves the day with kids! I played so much solitaire on the system my eyes were crossing.
There is no way we would have made it if we were carrying smaller children. That is a LONG run through the airport, isn't it?! Luckily my boys are old enough that when I said "RUN!" they ran! My mother-in-law was along and she was quite a way behind us, but figured as long as she could keep us in sight and we got to the gate to hold the plane....
I got really frustrated with the number of security checks we had to go through. I wish they would figure out some way to just check you REALLY WELL once and not 3 or 4 times over.
I was just glad that our connection GOING to Malaga was long enough (close to 2 hours planned, and was actually more like 3 1/2 hours because our connecting plane was late) and it was the flight home that was the close call. I don't mind missing a flight coming home, but would hate to delay my vacation.
I hope you had euros in your pockets when you arrived in Paris. That is a bugger of an airport to try to find an ATM machine. I really feel for you with the sick kids. I can't imagine anything worse. On the flight home, I started feeling sick about 2 hours left in the flight. The last hour I was seriously contemplating the barf bag, but grit my teeth so I wouldn't have to suffer the embarrassment. We landed in Detroit and I sprinted off the plane to the nearest bathroom and barfed. Barfed going through immigration. Barfed in the baggage claim. Oooooh, that was a long ride home from the airport. The last day in Spain we went to Morocco on a "Moroccan Fantasy" tour that included a Berber/Bedouin market town....it was raining and the streets were ankle deep in mud and excrement.....and then my 8 year old's shoes came untied. So I tied them for him and frantically tried to clean my hands back on the bus with a wet wipe. Obviously I didn't make them operating room clean because 24 hours later my own little gastrointestinal "Moroccan Fantasy" struck! So I ended up with a day blowing out one end and the next two days (and counting) blowing out the other end. Sigh.