I am happy and relieved to report that we successfully navigated a 6 hour flight with a 3 month old! Our first trip as a family though started out with a mountain of stress and frustration with our ‘frenemy’ United Airlines.
Here’s how it played out. Our flight was supposed to leave Newark at 8:30 am on Sunday morning. All night long we were receiving text updates that our flight was delayed until 9 am, 10 am, 11 am and 7:30pm at one point due to the 5 fresh inches of snow we were getting. At 6:30 am we received an update saying our flight was now departing at 11:00 am. So like any traveler with a small child, we stayed home as long as possible to avoid waiting in the airport for multiple hours. So at 7:30 am we were in our pajamas, making coffee, eating french toast, enjoying a Sunday morning when all of a sudden we received yet another update from United. ‘Your flight has been rescheduled to depart at 9:00 am,’ aka 90 minutes from that point in time. Andy and I each yelled multiple expletives that can’t be shared on a family blog, cursed the airlines and all people who work there. The baby started crying and sheer chaos set in. How could we possibly make a flight that takes off in 90 minutes when we live 30 minutes from the airport and are still in our pajamas? We rushed around like crazy people, throwing on clothes, packing bags, throwing bottles of breast milk into a cooler, changing diapers at a feverish pace and so on. Somehow we managed to get all of us out of the house in 15 minutes. Thank God we had packed most of our stuff the night before.
Andy drove like a bat out of hell down the interstate breaking almost all speeding laws. We roared into Newark at 8:20 am for our 9am flight. I hopped out and threw the baby in the front carrier to check our bags while Andy parked the car. We were so those people running threw the airport with kids, their personal belongings hanging everywhere, hair disheveled with a look a pure panic on their faces. By the grace of God we made our flight. We walked right onto the plane. And then it was everyone’s else turn to have the panic look. ‘Please don’t let those people with the baby sit next to me.’ Sorry 12C, you lose. The Phillips’ are in 12A and 12B today.
All in all Andrew did great! He slept, ate and was pretty content for the 6 hour flight. Only a few minor tantrums but heck, at the end of a long flight I’m fidgety and want to get off a plane too. He did find everything super exciting. He was wide eyed the whole time just trying to take everything in. Stimulation overload to say the least.
Feels like we’ve been on this plane for hours. Oh God. We’re only over Chicago.
