It’s HARD!

You might think people are exaggerating when they say how hard it is. Sure, getting to the gate will be a pain in the ass, but that’s it. The baby will just fall asleep on the plane. He’ll nurse and go down, lulled to sleep by the constant din of white noise or rocked by the stroller until you put him on your lap.

You’re wrong. He’s going to be so excited to see everything that he’ll tire himself out but then won’t be able to sleep because he’s too stimulated. And you know how baby’s get when they can’t sleep.

Your neighbor down the street might tell you they went to France with their 5 month old and loved it.

They’re lying. They’re just trying to get you to make the same mistake they did.

Your sister-in-law might say “Just take them places. Live your life. That’s what you gotta do.”

She’s right, but they never tell you how tired you’re gonna be.

And boy will you be tired.

The holidays were great, and I figure I should be more consistent about this stupid blog if I ever want it to be anything. So we traveled over the holidays. Six days, not even a whole week, and back before New Years.

The flight out was brutal. When you don’t have kids you jealously watch as families with young children get on the plane before everyone else. Then you get to do it as a family and you realize it’s actually a sort of hell, knowing that you’ll be on the plane even longer than everyone else. Our flight out was delayed by 3 hours, but they got everyone on the plane on time. Every 15 minutes the pilot would say “just crossing our t’s and dotting our i’s” like we would be taking off at any moment. Then after 2 hours they deplaned us and said we didn’t have a plane to fly. Then 5 minutes later we were back on the same plane for another hour before finally leaving.

They say flying with a baby is easier if you feed them during takeoff and landing so that their ears pop. They don’t really factor in 3 hour delays, though, so not only was the baby exhausted and cranky but we also ran out of food toward the end of the flight then everyone knew where the baby was, and when you’re on a flight with a baby you never want that baby to be the main focal point of the flight.

That first night might not have been what threw off the baby’s sleep for the next week, but it surely didn’t help. We left home with a relatively sleep trained baby who gave us 6-7 hours a night before waking, eating, and going back to sleep for 1-3 hours. We quickly sprinted in the wrong direction and by the time we got back home we had a baby who gave us 3-4 hours of sleep a night. Big difference, and you don’t have the “new dad adrenaline” (as my neighbor calls it) 6 months in to help keep you awake anymore.

The week itself is a blur of seeing old friends and family, many of them meeting the baby for the first time. It was genuinely wonderful, and I’m not going to detail any of that because I’m only using this post as a means of getting to my two favorite baby-related traveling anecdotes. It’s a pretty specific category so I don’t have many examples and there isn’t much competition. But here goes.

We did this same trip in October for a wedding. The baby cried some on the flight (don’t remember which) but it was otherwise uneventful. As we were deplaning, this old lady worked her way up beside us. We’ve had multiple instances of people touching the baby’s face in public, so my wife and I were pretty wary.

This old lady leans in and says, “I’ll give you a tip to get them to stop crying. For my kids in Ukraine, I splashed cold water on their face. It shocks them to quiet.”

I don’t remember exactly what we said, and we may have just stared at her in disbelief. No wonder the Ukranians won’t give up in this war. Their own mothers teach them very young to be resilient.

The second anecdote is from this holiday trip. On the flight home we sat across the aisle from another small family with a young child. The mom saw our Sophie the Giraffe toy when everyone else was boarding. Across the aisle while other people were getting on the plane, she said, “Oh, we had one of those too! We called him Jerry the Giraffe!”

Of course, I knew it’s called Sophie. But it’s not like the name is etched on there. The lady in the aisle between us though? She wasn’t having any of that shit. She immediately gasped and said, “It’s called Sophie!” and you could just see the horror on the mom’s face. Like she’d committed some grave sin for calling Sophie the Giraffe Jerry the Giraffe.

Anyway, that’s a dumb little story about how you should be kind to parents. It’s a hard job, and you never realize it when you don’t have kids. I certainly didn’t. Nothing prepares you for it, and I mess up every single day in some way or another. And if you see a mom or dad call a toy by the wrong name, maybe just let it slide. Their kid is going to correct them as soon as they can talk anyway.