How do you stretch a three hour nap over a four and a half hour flight...you don't
It has taken some time to get this down on paper. I think in reflection it is easier to find some humor in it. My predictions of an ill-fated plane ride home though dramatic, were pretty much on the mark. But really, what's a vacation without a little traveling drama? It makes the story a little more interesting for everyone. I would much rather hear about the crazy taxi driver who almost killed everyone, or the sudden thunderstorm that threatened to wash our beach hut into the bay, then, "we had a wonderful, relaxing time."
In an effort to have a repeat of our trip out, we tried to get young Ty to sleep as much as possible on the flight. We had kept him up late the night before and allowed him only limited napping in the morning. In the beginning he spent a short time fidgeting in the seats before the familiar fingers in the mouth trick which signaled it was time for nitey-nite.
It was nice to have him go down so easy. The problem though for us was how to stretch his two hour nap time over a four and a half hour flight. With a little more than 2 hours left in the flight, the little guy woke up hungry and fussy. We began with a bottle and some crackers. That bought us 15 minutes. Then he had some of the cookies that the flight attendant gave us and he played with some of his toys. After a diaper change and a few intermittent screeches we had killed another 30 minutes. That left us 1 ¼ hours left to fill. For a while Ty would focus on things in the seat, the moveable arm-rests, the tray tables, seat-belts. The screeches continued--just a few but they were more frequent and generally involved wanting or not wanting to do something. As we quickly ran out of occupying activities we resorted to the last resort--books. I realized at the time that even if I could maintain his interest in story-time, I certainly did not have enough reading material to last an hour. And I didn't think that I could read Spot's Big Adventure the necessary 17 ½ times in order to fill the 57 minutes left in the flight.
Unfortunately it was worse than that. Ty just was not in a quiet mood and not really into sitting listening to stories. He was a little attention-challenged and kept grabbing the pages and trying to close the book and becoming frustrated. Each time I took the book back from him in order to continue the story, he would screech. Then I began to notice the darting eyes-to the front, to the side, to the back. We were quickly becoming one of those horror story flights. You know, when the weary travelers lament about the screaming kid who wouldn't shut up during the flight. I realized that all he actually wanted to do was wander through the airplane--something he obviously couldn't do. His other preference was to wrestle the moveable arm rest and scream when he could not get it to move. At one point he began writhing in his seat and belting out some good long ones.
What's worse, there were other kids on the flight but they weren't being very loud, or perhaps they were but Ty was drowning them out. Not only were we loud, we seemed highly visible on the flight, because well, here are two grown men trying to handle this pre-toddler and I would imagine to most we were not doing a very good job.
I would like to believe that the giant Middle Eastern man in front of me and the scary looking long-haired woman behind us were really nice people under different circumstances. The few times I walked down through the plane with Ty, scary lady was standing behind our seats glaring down at us over her reading glasses. Besides the periodic glances over the back of his seat, the giant kept sighing and as we pulled into the gate he had a loud cell phone conversation intended for us to overhear, indicating to the person on the other end that this was indeed the worst flight of his entire life.
Are we to be banished from commercial flights? Should we be punished for trying to travel with a 1 ½ year old? And where were the flight attendants? Don't they have little airplane toys and wing pins and isn't that part of their job to distract little ones when their parents have exhausted all other options? I guess like everything else in the airline industry, they have cut out that service. Frankly, they seemed a little annoyed with us also--go figure.
By the time the wheels hit the ground, it was all starting to get under my skin even though I tried not to let it. The last 15 minutes were probably the worst since Ty had to be held tightly in our lap as part of our preparation for landing. There was a lot more back-arching and a fairly steady tirade of screams. I wasn't sure what was worse: his screaming or the hostility coming now from all around us. In the end though, we gave them all a really good story--in fact the best story. For the giant, it would rank up there with the worst ever traveling horror stories and he would live to tell it over and over and over.
It was our little bit of traveling drama. Not only does the giant and the scary lady have a story to tell, but so do I. So the next question is when is our next trip? Well, I hear that those crazy Californians are letting same-sex couples get married. What do you think--here we come Disneyland?!
