{"id":2777,"date":"2004-08-17T15:34:54","date_gmt":"2004-08-17T22:34:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/?p=2777"},"modified":"2004-08-17T15:34:54","modified_gmt":"2004-08-17T22:34:54","slug":"fly-by-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/2004\/08\/17\/fly-by-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Fly By Night"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s no surprise that birthrates in the United States dropped dramatically after the Wright Brothers’ famous flight in 1903*<\/sup>. After all, is there a more effective form of birth control than the knowledge that sex might lead to pregnancy and pregnancy will lead to a child and sooner or later you will wind up on a plane with said child and he will scream for the entire trip and then everyone in the world will hate you? (Oh man, just typing that sentence made me want to join an abstinence league.)<\/p>\n

And yet, that’s what we did two weeks ago — threw kid on one of them flying contraptions and shuffled off to Washington D.C. We purchased a ticket for The Squirrelly, though this was not strictly necessary (you’re allowed to hold children under the age of 2 on your laps while in flight). I was against spending the extra money, but my wife was at one of her parenting support groups a while ago — you know, those groups where, near as I can tell, they sit around a campfire and swap blood-curdling stories about terrible things that can happen to your child<\/em>? And, anyway, when The Queen mentioned that we were travelling to DC, another mother assured her that any babies not shackled to a car seat when a plane hits turbulence will perforce fly out of their mother’s arms and smash through the nearest window and be sucked into a turbine. So rather than become a party to hypothetical aeronautic infanticide, we sprang for the extra seat.<\/p>\n

The Squirrelly was exceptionally well-behaved for most of the flight, wherein “exceptionally well-behaved” is defined as “dead asleep” (probably because we took a redeye to maximize the chance that he’d slumber through the whole ordeal). He went out like the proverbial light the second the plane left the ground. Alas, such was not the case prior to take off: when we got stuck on the tarmac for half an hour he got increasingly bored, restless, and shrill. By the time we started taxiing down the runway the people around us looked like they were in the midst of a plane crash, gripping their seat arms with white-knuckled terror, their faces frozen into grimaces of horror as our child continued to increase in volume and eventually forewent inhaling entirely in favor one continuous, unbroken keen. Fortunately their psychological defense mechanisms must have kicked in immediately afterwards, because, by the end of the trip, everyone had apparently suppressed the traumatic memories of our child’s pre-flight freakout and they were all commending us for having such a charming critter.<\/p>\n

We had also taken someone’s advice and ordered vegetarian meals for the flight, despite the fact that we are carnivores to the core. We can’t remember who told us to do this (although we are trying, because we want to punch them), but someone said that requesting the veggie option ensures you get a healthy, homemade meal instead of the standard airline fare. That turned out to be technically true, but the “healthy, homemade meal” turned out to be the culinary equivalent of a birthday party where no one shows up. I’ll probably get sued by Northwest Airlines for revealing their top-secret vegetarian meal recipe, but this is what we received:<\/p>\n

Ingredients<\/b><\/p>\n

1\/3 cup cucumber, chopped
\n1\/3 cup onion, chopped
\n1\/2 pita bread<\/p>\n

Directions<\/b><\/p>\n

Place first two ingredients in latter ingredient. Garnish with a packet of mayonnaise, four baby carrots, tiny tub of warm water. Serves 1\/7th of a person.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We only got two meals, which didn’t seem quite fair. So we took it up with the stewardess, explaining that, although The Squirrelly is an infant, we did<\/em> pay for a third ticket and he should therefore receive a meal as well. We kind of had to go back and forth with the stewardess for a bit before she ceded the point and reluctantly agreed to breastfeed him.<\/p>\n

All and all things went pretty well. And the we learned a Very Important Lesson about air travel with infants: if the baby ain’t screamin’, don’t mess with it. You should resolutely ignore thoughts like “I bet I could make him a little bit happier if I stuck a pacifier in his cryhole,” because a kid on a plane is like a brushfire, your attempts to sooth him are like either<\/em> water or kerosene, and you won’t know which until it’s too late. In this respect babies are like dogs: it’s best to let sleeping ones lie. (Curiously, this completely contradicts the Very Important Lesson we learned during out last vacation, that babies are not<\/em> like dogs: you apparently can’t just leave them at home for a weekend with a big bowl of water and a chew toy.)<\/p>\n

* 100% made up fact.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s no surprise that birthrates in the United States dropped dramatically after the Wright Brothers’ famous flight in 1903*. After all, is there a more effective form of birth control than the knowledge that sex might lead to pregnancy and pregnancy will lead to a child and sooner or later you will wind up on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-squirrelly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}