In the many times I’ve flown, there has always been an unhappy child somewhere on the plane. I consider it part of the experience. The discomfort of air pressure changes are a big deal for little kids, a strange ear ache that arrives in a crowded and unfamiliar environment. But those crying children were never mine, and while I seldom felt annoyed, and even felt empathy for the children, I never experienced feeling responsibility for those unhappy kids – until this week.
In the flight to Denver, we managed to keep Oliver busy with a sticker book. Zaeda fell asleep just before we boarded and so she snoozed a good part of the way. Oliver was concerned with just one question: ‘Are we in the air yet?” I realized as I looked out the window at the passing tarmac, the blurring landscape, that he couldn’t see any of it; his point of view was just too low; it was all sky for him out the window. So he had to take our word for it that we were in the air. When we hit turbulence and the plane dropped a bit, he was thrilled and said “Whoa!!” and giggled in a way that some people on the plane may not have appreciated.
The kids were only challenging the last 10 minutes as we heading in for landing. They were just squirming in the limited space, and that ended soon enough as we got out of the plane, and soon enough, the kids were with grandparents to spoil them.
The flight back seemed to take three times as long. Zaeda was tired and well past her naptime, but she didn’t sleep. She crawled over the three of us, either squealing and giggling, or moaning and crying. Oliver was fidgety. He’d placed all the stickers he was going to bother with and he wanted to move. He was kicking the seat in front of him. “Are we in the air yet?” he asked, again and again. We were all exhausted by the time we got home.
Jenny and I spent a couple days in Estes Park in the Rocky Mountain National Park. Beautiful. Relaxing. We slept in. We ate. We goofed off. Just right.
Goofing off at Restoration Hardware
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