Elizabeth and I are back from our trip, and let me tell you, I am a little punchy today: there was a red-eye flight, and there was a significant time change, and anyway everything feels weird. Yesterday at this time we were one place! And now we are in a completely different place, feeling like it’s a different time than it is! Without sufficient sleep to process that situation!
Also, I am trying to catch up to usual life while also trying to undo the vacationy things, so I’m doing laundry and dealing with the mail pile and making a grocery list, and ALSO unpacking suitcases and processing photos and eating up the snacks we didn’t finish. I am doing this with the sheer willpower of coffee.
When I asked for advice about this trip, some of you advised me NOT to try to carry everything on our backs but to instead go ahead and pay the baggage fee to check a suitcase. Ever since I traveled across the country with an infant on my lap (which goes down in my personal history as the WORST WAY TO SAVE MONEY I HAVE EVER TRIED), I have been listening carefully to people who give me advice about traveling with children, and I’m VERY GLAD I did. It was not TOO much trouble to check a bag, compared to how much trouble it would have been to manage four (or even two) carry-ons. And then I didn’t have to take out a bag of liquids at security, or even LIMIT my liquids! I could take a whole bottle of sunscreen! My entire bottle of moisturizer!
As for how the whole trip went, I wrote a haiku for Paul and put it on a postcard:
Lost bag, canceled flight
Middle seat for eight hours
Still having fun time
Those eight hours were not all in a row, though they happened on the same day. The reason it was eight hours is that at 11:30 the night before our early-morning flight, the airline texted me that the second leg of our flight was canceled. When we arrived at the airport for the first flight (not knowing what else they expected us to do with that text), they told us Great News! they’d been able to book us on a replacement flight! We’d have a layover of over ten hours and we’d arrive at midnight instead of 4:00 p.m., but that’s okay, right? My strategy was to stand at the counter politely and in pitiful silence, with tears on the verge of welling up in my wide anxious eyes, until they came up with another idea. The ultimate solution involved switching us to another airline on a flight that flew right past our destination, then doubling back on yet another flight, but it got us there six hours earlier than the other plan so we did it and we said thank you very much for thinking of that clever idea.
Evidently our luggage went ahead with the 10-hour-layover plan, however, so we got it the next morning near lunchtime. Happily, I’d tucked a pair of underpants into each of our carry-ons. (On the way home, I added to the carry-on the three things I’d wished for while we waited for the luggage: deodorant, a comb, and the phone-charging cable. Several people/sites recommended carrying on a change of clothes for each of us, but I wasn’t willing to sacrifice that much carry-on room—and still wasn’t, even after we DID lose our luggage.)
The night flight went totally fine; in fact, it went better than the day flight. It was uncomfortable, but I was asleep for a lot of it so the feelings of discomfort seemed shorter. And there was so much less rummaging in carry-ons for snacks and activities, and so much less “child talking to me at 15-second intervals while I tried to read.” I was very glad to have our neck pillows, even though they were quite awkward to carry. I was also very glad neither of us needed to pee, because the guy in our aisle seat fell asleep and slept the whole way. The whole airplane-seating thing is unrealistic and wrong and doesn’t work. Here is another example: the way putting the seat back gives one passenger more space only at the expense of another passenger—who can get back that space only by stealing from a THIRD passenger. That is WRONG and should not be that way. Fix it, I say! FIX it!
Also, I can tell that I would not be able to work for an airport/airline without coming to see humanity as a herd of gross, inconsiderate, slobby jerks. Since one of my primary career goals is to avoid thinking of my fellow humans as gross, inconsiderate, slobby jerks, it’s a career I plan to avoid. (This is why I never want to work retail again if I can help it: it makes me think of my fellow humans as mean, self-centered, unreasonable jerks.)
The day flight was okay, too, but again our aisle-seat neighbor fell asleep. And that time we DID need to pee.
The best activity I brought was the Melissa & Doug Sticker-by-Number kit: Elizabeth used that more than anything else.
(photo from Amazon.com)
I also brought her a book (she’s been reading this cat-clan/warriors series and lovvvvvves it),
(photo from Amazon.com)
a reusable-sticker kit (it was too big for the plane, but perfect for at my parents’ house; I am planning to order one for myself, because I was jealous),
(photo from Amazon.com)
a guided coloring book (she liked it but I didn’t: I thought most of the prompts were too surreal and/or too hard to draw),
(photo from Amazon.com)
and this extremely odd book I can’t figure out (it’s a finding/I-spy type thing, but…strawberry mermaid bunnies?) but she loves it.
(photo from Amazon.com)
And my brother lent us his iPad, and Elizabeth played a Toca Boca game called Hair Salon 2 so happily and incessantly, my MOM downloaded a copy for HERSELF and the two of them played it side by side. At one point my mom, dad, and Elizabeth were ALL playing Hair Salon 2. It’s a fun game.
(photo from Amazon.com)
I really hate Hair Salon 2. I can recognize that it’s a really fun and innovative game with tons of options and ways to not get bored and even toddlers can play it and NON-toddlers can enjoy it and actually improve their fake hairstyling skills over time which I’m sure is really rewarding. BUT. I have a device of one kind or another – because it’s on ALL the devices – flung into my lap at least 75 times a day, accompanied by the exclamation “NOW IT’S YOUR TURN MAKE MY GIRL PRETTY!” and Penelope has inevitably just shaved some girl bald and wants me to do something with that. OR? OR? Do you know what happens if you leave that app up and just walk away? It just keeps making nonverbal sounds. “Oooh. Err. Mmrrr. Uuuh.” OVER AND OVER AND OVER.
When I started recklessly stuffing my laptop deep inside my suitcase and checking it instead of taking it through security and having to take it out and repack it while trying to get my shoes out of the bin and put them back on in that weird panicky state, I felt like I was cheating the first few times. BEST IDEA EVER. Check everything. Check all of it. I’d check my family members if I could. I want responsibility for nothing when I’m in an airport. I want to skip as much of the process as possible. I actually don’t even want to go anywhere, come to think of it.
Ohhh, the Toca Boca games are so good. There was a hair salon one at Christmas where you got to style Santa’s hair/beard and Lexi played it for hours and hours. There’s also a robot one that’s fun and one where you essentially just get to maintain a household: make beds, do laundry, check the mail, iron clothes, etc. I can’t imagine a more boring game, but she loves it. Toca Boca, man. It’s like crack for younger kids.
I was just coming here to say the exact same thing.
Though I would like to know why fake chores are so awesome and real chores are so terrible…
Can you remind us Elizabeth’s age? (for applicability-of-tips purposes :) )
She is 9.
Omg, I CANNOT believe Elizabeth is 9!! I have been reading your blog since she was 2!
Hannah (6) loves those Toca Boca Games.
I love to have the window seat when I fly, but this turned out to be a Very Bad Idea when I took the red eye home from Phoenix this past winter. I had to pee, so badly that I knew I’d never make it, so I had to wake TWO people up. I felt terrible.
My daughters (3 and 13) LOVE the hair styling game. As crazy as THEY are about it, I (35) might love it more! :)
Ugh, a canceled flight AND a lost bag. I’m so glad you had a good time in spite of the travel hassles. Despite the lost luggage fiascoes I have experienced, checking the bag(s) is still a better choice than sweating over whether you’ll get an overhead bin, or whether you’re going to have to annoy all the flight attendants and fellow passengers when you inevitably can’t find a spot for the blasted bag. Plus, dragging a bag all over the airport blows. Anyway, I hope your jetlag passes quickly! Kudos on making this big trip!
We have Toca Tailor and while I really don’t like it (and my camera roll is filled with toca!) the girls LOVE it. I should look into hair salon, if I never want to use my ipad for anything again is what I mean.
Your flight sounds easy after traveling with my two year old and two month old this summer. Luckily I had my husband AND my brother-in-law with me to cart our two diaper bags, double stroller, car seat, nursing pillow, etc. but the whole time I was daydreaming about traveling with just one kid, or even better, ALONE!
The airline messed up our flights coming back. Our fist flight was so delayed that they had to hold the connecting flight for us–which they had overbooked by one seat. They had to give someone vouchers for a free trip in order to get us all on the plane, only to realize that no, we couldn’t have three seats just anywhere on the plane because under NO circumstances could our two year old sit between two strangers! (The infant was on my lap). So they had to make even more people move. I had the baby in the k’tan and planned on keeping him there until the seat belt sign was off so I could go pee (Hadn’t had a chance between rushing from the last flight–couldn’t just hand him off to my husband or bro in law because they were seated far away). When the flight attendant told me that I couldn’t leave the baby in the k’tan during takeoff, I burst into tears.
Luckily she was a nice old lady and offered to sit in my seat and hold the baby while I went to the bathroom, and another passenger took pity and held my nursing pillow and diaper bag, and we held up the plane for another few minutes while I went to the bathroom.
Worst. Travel. Ever.
Gabriel loves those weird feral warrior cat books.
Toca Hair Salon has a SEQUEL? Oooooooooh man, my children are going to be pumped about that.