Traveling With Babe (Part I)
At our destination, SFBaby ♥ Kittens (and SFGrandma)
Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4
Last week’s baby-plus-airplane adventure was enough of a slog that it’s taken a full week to even gather up the energy to write about it.
The story goes something like this:
SFBaby and I set out for the airport, armed only with a Baby Bjorn, a rollie suitcase, and one personal item (my diaper bag, which looks suspiciously like my laptop bag).
Still in a state of denial as a former business traveler, I decided that I needed to cram all of the necessities for the trip into carry-on luggage, including five days worth of diapers and wipes, breast milk and formula, baby clothing, winter clothing, a suit and tie, a pair of size 12 shoes, etc. As you can guess, it was tight. It was really tight. I figure that the job would have been easier if I weren’t traveling in the winter, or if I didn’t have to fit a suit or the extra pair of shoes into my luggage. (In hindsight, I don’t think I’d try to do all of the above again.)
The first hurdle came at the airport. Just after the person at the head of the security line waved me through, she called me back and admonished me because my bag was supposedly big to fit on the plane. She told me that I needed to go back and check it. I told her that it would be fine and that I’d flown with it before. She insisted that they’d still make me cabin-check it at the gate if I went through. From those past business travel days, I knew that it was important to recognize who you have to pay attention to and who you can ignore. In this case, this person was a TSA ID-checker trying to tell me something about the size of my bag—with no bag-sizing device in sight—so I decided to walk away (and she eventually let me be).
When we eventually got to our seat on the plane, I admit that I had a certain smug sense of satisfaction as I pounded my poor, overstuffed bag into the overhead compartment with almost no room to spare.
The first four hours of our first flight went by quickly and smoothly. SFBaby was bouncing up and down and having a lot of fun playing peek-a-boo with my seatmates, but she was in good shape overall. The last hour was more challenging, but even by the time we got off, everyone was telling me how good my baby had been.
The second flight of the day posed more of a problem. SFBaby’s bedtime was just after takeoff, but it was only a 90-minute flight, so it didn’t make sense to put her to sleep only to wake her up again when we got off the plane. Thus, the last flight was with an overtired baby and it turned into a bit of an ordeal. Needless to say, no one said anything about SFBaby by the time we got off that flight.
It was great to be on the ground again, as well as to have a throng of adoring relatives willing to provide relief child care duties when the need warranted.
Aside from the fact that it was -22°C (-8°F) the day after we arrived, the time spent at our destination went by quickly and as expected. It turns out that SFBaby also really likes cats!
Stay tuned for part II to read about the theatrics on our return flight…
Tags: airplane, airport, baby bjorn, bag size, bjorn, carry-on, cats, luggage, rollie suitcase, Travel, TSA