The baby flies!

Flying with a screaming baby is one thing if the baby is in the seat in front of you. It's another thing if the child is yours. Not only is there tremendous peer pressure to keep the baby happy (read: quiet), but there's the realization that if the baby is not, in fact, happy, you're stuck with her. For hours. In a confined space.

Flying with a screaming baby is how Matt and I expected to spend both Thursday and Friday of this past week. Why both days? It only takes a few hours to fly to the midwest! Because last year at this time we were sitting for hours on a random runway in North Dakota (not our destination or our layover) while the lavatory overflowed. Other trips have had us staying overnight in strange cities, languishing on other random runways or just turning around and going back home due to cancellations. In fact, we have issues more often than not.

So when I packed us up for our 12-day trip to visit almost every family member and relative we have, I made sure to plan for a surprise hotel stay in our layover city as well. No daughter of mine would be wearing the same outfit two days in a row! I packed several outfits for her and a change of underwear for me.

We arrived at the airport rather early, and were met with our usual fate: the airplane we'd be flying out on was one of two arrivals that morning that were delayed. What's more, we'd be racing an ice storm. Fortunately for all of us, Kalina got a nice nap in her stroller while we debated whether to give up and try to scalp our tickets.

We held up the security line, but not as badly as we'd thought we would. End to end on the conveyor belt our stuff probably took up about 15 feet of space but no one gave us the evil eye. Jolly holiday travelers before the rush, perhaps?

This is when we began to realize that ironically, fellow passengers smile on you when you travel with a cute baby. "The baby is nice now," we tried to tell them. "But we make no promises in the air." Would these same people hand us parachutes and show us the hatch later on?

We had some, but not complete, good cause to worry. Our baby gets bored easily--she likes to be walked around. What's more, she was getting over a cold, which can spell ear pain on takeoff and landing. Everything rested on the first flight. Would she weather it like the trooper we know she can be? Or would we be driving the rest of the way?

With these worries combined with the not-slim-enough possibility that our flights would ruin our Christmas plans, we didn't notice the hard airport chairs for the pins and needles we were on.

The time came to board the plane, and we waited for the call for passengers with children to budge in line: the only benefit to traveling with a baby. The call never came, so we budged anyway. No one blinked an eye and we spent the next 15-20 minutes getting settled, rookie parent travelers that we are.

The passengers around us were all immediately smitten with Kalina. There was unfortunately some confusion as far as whether she was a boy or a girl, being dressed in a warm green and yellow sleeper and not yet capped by a full head of hair. Once we assured them she was a girl, they all responded that had known she was far too pretty to be a boy and most of them continued to refer to her as "she." From then on I tried to surround her with as much pink as possible.

And then came takeoff. I waited for the screaming that would send me into a frenzy in trying to relieve her ear pain (Matt had a pacifier on standby--a very rare treat these days--and I knew just where the Tylenol and nose drops were). Instead of screams, I was confronted by smiles. Could this be my baby? The one I'd hold in my lap the rest of the trip?

In another rare stroke of luck, both flights passed extraordinarily quickly as we bounced, dangled and coo-cooed our way across the country. Kalina's favorite distraction on the journey was a slightly inflated ziploc sandwich bag and it kept her occupied for a full 20 minutes. Being on vacation, she was allowed to munch on it to her heart's content.

And so Kalina is now an expert traveler, although we're still working on the airplane nap in Mommy's arms. That will be for the return trip.

As a result of our effort, we're all enjoying a thorough pampering and dousing with snow.