Travel Don'ts
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Travel Don’ts
Here’s how NOT to fly cross-country with your two young children. Consider it a parental Public Service Announcement—just on the heels of Spring Break.
1. Take a flight scheduled at the end of the day, at the end of your vacation.
2. Before the flight, go to an expensive restaurant for brunch. Buy your kids pancakes, which they refuse to eat. Watch as they fight over a small sticker in front of your friends from London who you see once every five years, and whose children are not only perfectly-mannered, but have British accents making them seem even MORE polite.
3. Find out the restaurant is cash-only. Set down the insufficient money you have and promise your friends you’ll “get them next time” (i.e. in five years).
4. Take taxi to friend’s apartment and discover it’s the one New York cabbie who doesn’t take credit cards. Drive to ATM and withdraw only the cash needed to pay him. Drag whining, exhausted, and ravenous children inside.
5. Frantically finish packing and call car service. Ask kids to pee. Have urination stand-off. Give up. Drag luggage to elevator where three-year-old announces, “I have to tinkle. Bad!” Go back to apartment, at which point (you later learn) the car you called gives up on you and leaves.
6. Schlep one immense roller bag, one carry-on, two car seats, one laptop bag, one double stroller (the size of a Cadillac Escalade), and two empty-bladdered children to sidewalk. Realize you have to pee.
7. Watch kids doze off on short ride to airport and know that your chances of them sleeping on the plane have been officially obliterated.
8. Arrive at airport one hour later then planned. Hand driver credit card which he swipes repeatedly without luck. Watch as he takes swiper-thingy outside, holding it to the sky like a bird he’s setting free, in an attempt “to get a better signal.” Time ticks on. Three-year-old wakes and bellows, “I need Baba [her stuffed animal who’s wedged God-knows-where in a bag on the curb]!” Driver gives up on getting signal for credit card machine and/or making contact with alien life forms. Tick tock. 40 minutes ’til flight. Driver has you call his office with credit card number. Get repeated busy signals and age five years—maybe more.
9. Struggle into airport and see you were dropped off at Virgin Atlantic not Virgin America. Haul bags, car seats, stroller, and children across terminal with weakened, rapidly-aging body.
10. Check in. Wait in security line. Ten minutes later realize it is not the security line.
11. Find out Security is downstairs. Wait as only working elevator is crammed like a clown car with a large Indian family. Door will not close since Grandma’s wheelchair repeatedly blocks it. Check cell phone: 4PM. Check boarding passes. It’s boarding time! Reflect on all the fun you’re having. Have thoughts interrupted by three-year-old’s scream, “I. Want. Babaaaa!”
12. At Security TSA agent asks, “Why do you only have two boarding passes?” Have full-bore flop sweat and paw through purse when he looks down and says chuckling, “Oh, HERE it is…” then winks at you. Determine you hate all men. Except your husband who you can’t wait to thrust the kids at if you ever get home.
13. Experience public act of bad mothering when, 10 minutes ’til take-off your five-year-old refuses to enter security scanner. Scream head off, drag her in. She breaks free and flees like a feral cat. A compassionate agent ushers you through anyway. Maybe all men not so bad.
14. Sprint like madwoman to gate. Hear “final boarding call” and, panting, hand boarding passes to ticket agent. Three-year-old proffers high-decibel request for stuffed lamby, with glaring omission of word “please” and without British accent.
15. Ticket agent says, “I’ll have to take your carry-on. Our overhead bins are full.” At which point you burst into tears and howl, “You can NOT take this bag!” (Which has books, crayons, snacks, wipes, and extra clothes. Oh, and Baba. At this point a wild boar could not force you to hand over Baba.) Ticket lady fears you and your tears—especially when they trigger both kids to start bawling in an if-Mom’s-losing-it-we-should-be-too moment of solidarity.
16. On board see plenty of room in overhead bins. (Decide to hate all women.) Smugly settle into seats with carry-on bag.
17. Flight delayed 30 minutes due to storm/air traffic control/your crappy luck.
18. Flight delayed 30 more minutes. God making sure you know He’s still watching. Clearly somewhere, somehow you’ve been a very bad person.
19. Lift-off. Joy!
20. See that plane has wi-fi. Battery dying on laptop, but looky here—a power socket! Kids ensconced in TV. Losing brain cells, but also not bugging you.
21 Start writing. Chuckle to yourself. See? You haven’t lost your sense of humor! You’ve survived evil airport employees, demanding ill-tempered children, and broken credit card machines. You got through security—even if you were publicly clawed by your child.
22. Notice youngest child make an odd wiggling motion. Then a warm pink liquid gushes from her mouth covering your arm, her body and filling the cavernous void between your seats.
23. Note that your day has gone perfectly wrong, giving you statistical hope that something this miserable will never happen again.
24. Mop up puke with super-kind flight attendant. (Decide to un-hate women.) Change kid into clean clothes from carry-on. And marvel at the fact that Baba has remained virtually un-touched by puke. What excellent luck.
Kristen McClusky has taken her daughters on dozens of flights but has only been barfed on once. She feels certain that airplane restrooms were designed by men who have never changed diapers. Kristen blogs at motherload and works at Mamasource.
