coffee n' milk: August 2009

In just a few days we will be flying to Germany to visit our family there. I'm quite worried about how the trip will go because although it's only a 1 and a half hour flight it's very early and Maya will probably be quite tired, she also a super active child and just doesn't stay still for a second. So i'm already stressed by the thought of trying to entertain her plus keep her quite for the duration of the flight. So if you have any tips, ideas or know of any good-child-safe sleeping pills/tranquilizers PLEASE let me know. Anyway this is an article i recently read about someone in my very same predicament. Enjoy, and do keep us in your prayers!

A few for fun

Terror on flight 611

By Dave Barry, Miami Herald

Recently, my wife and I took our 8-month-old daughter on a trip involving five plane flights in one week. Many people would be reluctant to travel with a baby that small. An intelligent person, or even a reasonably bright fungus, would know that two people cannot possibly carry both a baby and all the supplies the baby needs, including stroller, car seat, clothes, diapers, industrial-sized bale of wipes, stuffed bear, stuffed tiger, stuffed frog, etc. The total weight of all these supplies can be hundreds of times the weight of the actual baby.

We were one of those traveling families you see getting on planes—the kind where you don't actually see the people, just this mound of baby equipment shuffling slowly down the aisle toward you. This sight is always hugely popular with the other passengers, some of whom will yank open the emergency exits and dive out of the plane. Because they know what babies do on planes: They stand on their parents' laps and stick their heads up over the seats, so they can get maximum range when they shriek. On a baby-intensive airplane, you see shrieking baby heads constantly popping up all over, like prairie dogs from hell.

As a parent in this situation, your fervent hope is that the other babies on the plane will shriek louder than yours, thereby diverting passenger hatred away from you.

The trick for keeping your baby from crying on the plane is to come up with a new activity each time the baby gets bored. A standard baby gets bored every 15 seconds, so on a four-hour flight, you, as a parent, need to come up with 960 different activities. By the third hour of the flight, your standards are pretty low. Baby wants to crawl into the cockpit and bite the navigator on the ankle? Whatever baby wants!

Here's what a stupid parent I am: On our first flight, I brought two newspapers on board. I did not read one word of either one. What I read was a book called Farm Faces, which is made entirely of cloth. There's a cow on the cover, and each page has a new animal. Here's the entire text: "chick," "lamb," "pig," "duck," "horse," "worm." I read this book to my daughter maybe 40 times, using a dramatic and excited voice to show her how fascinating it was. I mean, talk about a surprise plot twist! I NEVER would have guessed "worm"!

It goes without saying that your baby will poop massively on the plane. Each year, more baby poop is produced on airplanes than in all of Portugal. Fortunately, most planes have a little changing shelf in the bathroom, which is the perfect size for a baby, provided that it is a baby gerbil.

You know what we need? We need an airline just for people with babies. The planes would not have seats: Everyone would squat on the floor. The preflight safety lecture would consist of a demonstration of how to get a Lego out of a child's mouth. The in-flight meal would be Cheerios. If the noise reached a certain decibel level, plastic tubes would automatically pop out of the ceiling to dispense tranquilizer to the parents.