Parenting at 35,000 feet

The Wife and I decided our lives were too easy, so late last week we loaded our borderline-hyperactive 5-year-old and our teething, ear-infection-prone infant into a plane packed with travelers and flew four hours to California.

Yes, I did this voluntarily, but only two things would drain my brain of enough mental capacity to enable me to make such a decision: A funeral or a wedding. Fortunately, it was the latter that prompted this particular trip.

I've said repeatedly on this blog that I hate flying, and though I've flown enough in recent years that I'm no longer crawling the walls whenever we enter a tad bit of turbulence, the rest of my anti-flying beliefs hold true -- generally poor customer service, overpriced meals, ridiculous luggage fees, the constant prospect of being strip searched, etc.

(That said, I've got to say that my trip was uneventful and pleasant, at least from a customer service standpoint, and I'm not just saying that because my airline, Delta, is taking me to Las Vegas in a couple of weeks and thus has my future in its hands. Nice, Delta. Niiiice, Delta.)

Adding kids to a plane trip is like adding Diet Coke to Pop Rocks. Everything is far more difficult and combustible -- getting tickets, checking luggage, going through security, walking past the rows of stores hocking overpriced food and tourist items without spending an entire paycheck in an effort to keep your child pacified, etc.

The older one, wiggly as he is, is relatively simple once we get him on the plane: Just plug him into a DVD player and spend hours in quiet-child bliss.

(Seriously, in my before-kid days I swore I'd never get portable video players for a vehicle or for a plane flight and had no idea what true use they had; then I had a child and realized that my pre-child self was a complete and utter idiot.)

The infant is not so easy because he's simply try to eat the DVD player. And, upon entering the plane, the baby makes one of two choices:

1. I could spend much of this trip napping and quietly eating and playing with the small selection of toys brought to pacify me with;
2. I could decide to not sleep and instead scream bloody murder the entire trip so that most of the passengers will be wishing to toss my parents from the plane. At 35,000 feet.

Children so often pick Option No. 2 that parents actively encourage loading the baby with over-the-counter depressants. As we waited for our first flight, in a kids' play area, we talked with another parent who had taken his 3-year-old on so many flights that the kid had enough frequent-flier miles to buy an entire ticket. When we told him how long our flight was, his only tip was, "Uh, Benedryl."

So I knew that my baby would take Option 2, and so to spite me he took Option 1 on both flights (though he didn't fall asleep on the way there until two minutes before the plane landed.)

But we were provided with a little perspective on both plane flights in the form of another set of parents, with three children -- the same set both on the way there and the way back. On both flights, the youngest of the three decided to skip past Options 1 and 2 and go straight to Option No. 3 -- The Nuclear Option. She literally screamed the entire trip. (This, by the way, was an absolutely adorable girl who, at one point during the trip there, decided to say "Hello" to every individual passenger.)

All I could do is look at the Dad with sympathetic eyes while thinking to myself, "Oh, Thank God I'm not him."

But it was a good trip. The wedding was fun and I got free cake and copious amounts of decidedly unhealthy food that was funded by someone else. We got to visit San Francisco where we ate sourdough bread and In-n-Out Burger and I got chastised by a cable car operator for my wayward elbow. And then we performed a death-defying drive along narrow, windy roads up and down a mountain in search for big-ass redwood trees. And at some point a woman woke up much of our hotel by screaming and pounding on doors and breaking things. We had a bonfire on the beach and caught wafts of marijuana being smoked by this neighboring party apparently filled with people who need the drug for medicinal purposes. And I now know the definition of "beach bum."

I also got a kid story. The Boy, who is 5 and is eager to spell words, looked out the window as we ate lunch at In-n-Out and noticed a sign to a neighboring restaurant.

"I can spell THAT word, Daddy!" he said, proudly -- and in his normal volume, high.

"OK," I said, not knowing the word of which he spoke. "Spell it."

"H-O-O-T-E-R-S!"

(Pause for laughter from me, The Wife and most of our fellow burger eaters.)

"What does that spell, Daddy?"

"Just wait a few years, kid, and you'll find out."