Flying adventures

Well, Lucy B, your trouble-free flying streak ground to a teeth-chattering halt this weekend as we flew back from Thanksgiving in Idaho. In your short 6-1/2 months, you've flown six times and for five of them, you've been a dream baby. Playing on our laps. Nursing on the take-off and landing. Sleeping. Lots of sleeping. Well you more than made up for it coming home on your last flight! Halfway through the one-hour flight, you started getting fussy, slowly ramping it up to a cry, from there moving on to a panicky wail, before going all in and concluding the flight with 15 minutes of banshee shrieks as we were landing. Your mom and I tried the whole gamut to help you: bouncing, shoving a pacifier in your mouth, walking up an down the aisle, offering you food, promising you a My Little Pony Malibu beach stable with both the race track AND glue factory add-ons. All to no avail. Looking out the window worked occasionally to give the other poor passengers 30-seconds of respite to rest their eardrums. After you'd refilled your lungs to the volume of that of a blue whale, you were ready to start in again. If it weren't so traumatizing, I'm sure it would have been comical to see your parents frantically pass you back and forth between them in the hopes that a new trick or a change of scenery might console you. When we landed, people actually kept to their seats to let you and your mom off the plane first! They were that eager to see you feel better... and to not hear you crying anymore, but I'm sure that was just a small part of their motivation. Anyway, I stayed on the plane to gather all our stuff and by the time I got into the terminal, there you were, smiling and happy in your mom's arms as if the past eternity hadn't happened at all! I think that from now on, we'll make sure we never again fly in the evening and that we always pack some Mother's Little Helper (AKA Children's Benadryl), since you might be allergic to.... uhh, the little bags of snacks that serves as airline meals these days or maybe the subtle scent of jet fuel. Hopefully one of those two will work, as we're flying to Utah in a week, which will give you another seven days for your lung capacity to grow.