[exhale] Sleeping in your own bed in your own house after a busy trip away—there must be something better, but I can’t think of it right now. Mostly because I’m still tired from jetlag and waking up at 5:30 with Baby Harbat, who decided to revert to East Coast time.
The trip home was very busy and had my wife and BH and I ricocheting between family and social engagements. Visits home are fun but often our vacation begins when we come home and go back to work.
Yesterday I learned that flying west against the jetstream not only adds to flight time, it also stretches the space-time continuum like a ribbon of taffy. Our six-hour flight yesterday felt easily triple that. Midway through the flight I suspected we’d boarded the wrong plane and were winging over the Pacific towards Malaysia. The space-time continuum is also stretched when your child is screaming and carrying on. BH was fine on the flight over, but decided to get back at us on the way back. Even in the boarding area, I should have smelled trouble when she threw herself on the floor in a screaming gibbering heap when she wasn’t allowed to walk up the down escalator. After we boarded, we quickly reached Crying Checkmate, where every move led to tears. The next forty hours aloft were a desperate cycle of squirming, screaming, fitful sleep that COULD NOT BE INTERRUPTED BY ANYTHING, and more squirming. Across the aisle from us, an Asian baby roughly the same age was sleeping in her mother’s lap. That f%$*ing baby slept for five hours straight, then sat in her mother’s lap the rest of the flight and calmly read the emergency exiting card. BH, meanwhile, was seeing if she could kick the guy in the window seat while sticking her head into the aisle and performing a horizontal triple lutz.
Now I know that being stuck on a plane with a screaming baby is annoying. Being stuck on a plane with YOUR screaming baby is annoying³. I think next time we’ll do a two-leg journey across the country with a long layover. And we’ll slip something into BH’s sippy cup. And we’ll fill daddy’s sippy cup with single malt.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
I highly recommend slipping something in the sippy cup and into YOUR sippy cup. Alternately, you could set her loose down the aisle and pretend she belongs to someone else even when grabbing at your legs and yelling Babo. Who knows what Babo means anyways? Oh….sweet payback my dear.
Actually she wasn't all that bad. After a good night's sleep she's back to being an angel again. It must've been cumulative jet lag, or the frustration of traveling again so soon. Or, most likely, it was sweet payback.