Flight Risk

By the time Caden turned one years old he had been on 25 planes. Insane!! 99% of the flights went pretty smoothly, considering most of them were just the two of us.. It wasn't until he started walking that things got not so fun. Take our last trip for instance.... This time, all of us were traveling together. Two parents should be easier, right? The first leg of our flight was only two hours to Houston. Perfect, right? Piece of cake, right? Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

First, I realize that airport security is there to make air travel safer for all of us right? But, come on, forcing a baby to dump out his sippy cup and remove his little shoes that take 10 minutes to wrestle back on? (Note to self...get the Velcro kind next time.) It's just not the easiest thing holding your child while taking his shoes off, your OWN shoes off, folding the stroller up, putting it on the conveyor belt while your child is trying to grab everything during the process. So there I was, holding a squirming WIDE AWAKE baby at 4:30am, trying to rush through this process so as not to miss our plane, while he is squirming and waving at everyone in sight. Then we had to double back and retrieve the stroller that was left on the conveyor belt along with our 6 billion carry-on items. (I am AMAZED at how much a 24 pound baby requires to travel!!!)

We board, give Caden his blanket and pacifier and attempt to get him settled. Yeah, right. He’s pointing out the window shouting “oiuroauoiupoiueroiu!" "woeirueoiugoiwuerou!" SOOOO loud. He sounds like he's talking Chinese or something and the more we tried to put our hands over his mouth to quiet him, (I mean it WAS an ungodly hour) the louder he got. He actually started making people laugh it was so funny the way he was attempting to talk. After he quiets down he then proceeds to start doing leg presses on the seat in front of him. This child can press triple his body weight, I swear. We took off his shoes so as to soften his kicks to the back of the seat. Yeah, right. I had much apologizing to do already and we hadn't even taken off yet.

Caden busied himself licking the window (lovely) and putting the tray up and down in front us. When he saw someone put their window shade down, you might as well have put a piece of raw meat in a lion's cage. He DOVE for the window and started SLAMMING the shade up and down. Oh dear God......

We spent the next two hours passing Caden back and forth between us, prying his fingers off the hair of the passengers in front of us, retrieving his pacifier from the people behind us, flagging down the flight attendant to refill his sippy cup, and praying desperately that Caden would not throw a tantrum in this tiny beast of a plane. Not only does Caden NOT sleep AT ALL, but he actually breaks a sweat from the exertion of everything he’s doing in that little 3 feet of area.

On our flight home from Houston to Nashville there were so many planes in line to take off that we had to sit on the runway for 45 minutes. We mentally counted the number of gray hairs that had sprouted during the trip and swear to never, ever step foot on a plane again until Caden is 16. Too darn bad for our families. They’ll just have to come see us and make do with web cams. :)

As if to make up for things, Caden slept and behaved beautifully the last leg of our trip home. All in all he did pretty good for an eighteen month old learning about his world. Really, I can’t complain too much. Sure, he purposely kicked over my drink, forcing me to spend a leg of the trip sitting in a puddle of ice water. Sure, he insisted on opening his packet of pretzels himself, showering everyone in the surrounding seats with pretzel crumbs and salt. Sure, he licked every nasty plane surface he could find, and chose to wait til we got on the plain to totally fill his diaper. Sure we almost lost our minds, but it's all worth it right? I can't help but ALMOST laugh now....almost. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’m going to go shred my frequent flyer card. :)