Flying High

And then, came the dreaded plane ride. As it happens, toddlers LOVE airplanes. From the moment we told Luke he'd be getting to ride on an airplane, there was a non-stop, very whiny, halfway hyperventilating stream of "Airplane? Big airplane? Sit big airplane? Guk sit big airplane? Mama sit big airplane? Dada sit big airplane?" etc. Luckily, we've learned from our on-the-job training, so we didn't mention a word about the airplane until five minutes before boarding, so we only had to endure about four minutes and fifty seconds of this torture. DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG FOUR MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS IS?

We got onto our airplane--our very small, very ill-equipped airplane that was supposed to fly us over the Atlantic--and noticed that hey, not all the seats were taken. I'm not usually one for a sense of entitlement, but we had a baby with no seat...and there were extra seats on the plane...and a happy, well-rested baby would be better than a tired, grumpy, loud baby for EVERYONE on that plane. So we were hoping that the nice flight attendant who kept patting Luke's head might offer us an extra seat.

No dice. The nice flight attendant finally came and said something to the effect of, "Gee, I wish one of those empty seats on the airplane was the seat next to you guys so that you could have an extra seat. But unfortunately, the seat next to you seems to be taken. What a conundrum." (Ok, so I paraphrased that a bit.)

At this point, my stepdad stepped in and suggested that since there were three of us in two seats, while across the row from us, there was one woman in THREE seats, perhaps we could switch with the woman, and then there'd be three people in three seats and one person in two seats, so everyone would win. (Well. I guess the woman who went from having three seats to herself to having only two didn't exactly win. But again, if you factor happy, rested baby into the equation, we're back to everyone winning.)

Dude, you should've seen the look of revelation on the flight attendant's face. It was like he had seen the light. This solution, this seemingly very simple and common sense solution had NEVER occurred to him. And he thought it was the Greatest. Idea. Ever. So great, in fact, that my stepdad and my mom got free beverages of the alcoholic persuasion for the entirety of the flight, just for coming up with this piece of brilliance.

And thanks to the extra seat, Luke slept almost the entire way from New York to Brussels, woke up and ran around the airport for two hours, and then conked out again for the next six or seven hours on the flight from Brussels to Chennai. And then, he woke up and ate yogurt covered berries and watched Animal Planet the rest of the way. As a result of which this will go down in history as the easiest 20 hour plane trip in the history of airplanes.