We arrived at the airport an hour and 15 minutes early and decided at the last minute to use our brand-new umbrella stroller. The stroller was a good call as Asa sat strapped in the thing for about 45 minutes while we wound our way through the security line. As we approached the conveyor I took him out, unloaded the laptop, his food and drink and sadly, his bunny (toy, not live) and put them on the belt. Asa started freaking out that bunny was gone and I started panicking as I struggled to collapse our stroller. The damn thing was stuck. Seconds turned to minutes. Asa went from mild alarm to out-right anger and fear at the lack of bunny. The guards couldn't get the stroller folded. I couldn't get the stroller folded. Finally the man behind me was able to figure it out. Four minutes later.
Four minutes doesn't sound very long, does it? But think, you reheat your coffee for 1 minute, and that feels like forever. You sit at a long traffic light for 3 minutes and that feels like forever. Imagine you are barefoot in an airport with a screaming toddler clasped in one hand and a line of fellow travelers so long that you cannot see the end of it. And it takes you FOUR minutes to collapse the freakin' stroller that was supposed to make your life so much easier .... Not a good feeling. I actually turned and apologized to the group at large before I scooped Asa up (both of us red-faced but for different reasons - humiliation is the worst) and went through the machine.
On the other side of the screening machine I found our bag being totally unpacked down to the last book. They had to check everything in the bag because I had inadvertently left a bottle of children's allergy medicine in the backpack during the whole umbrella stroller fiasco. So, I am now standing barefoot while they test his milk to be sure it really is milk and his juice to be sure it really is juice and his medicine to be sure it really is medicine.
*may I just say here, what a sad state the world has come to when the milk a mother packs for her baby is deemed suspicious.
The guard offered to help me "pack" it all back in the bag which really amounted to him cramming things in whichever way he could and left me with a totally disorganized bag. This wouldn't be such a big deal to me if it were just me flying on my own. But as a mother I depend on organization to help make life run smoothly. Traveling alone with a toddler with a bag where I could reach into each pocket and know exactly where the item I was searching for was located was the crux of my plan. What I was left with after security was a bag of random crap.
And so, we eventually found ourselves on the airplane, crammed into one seat together because kids under 2 fly free in your lap and the last time we did this Asa was a lot smaller and fit on my lap much easier.
What I hadn't planned on was that once we were seated I wouldn't be able to actually reach down and access the bag or anything in it. With Asa on my lap and passengers on either side of us I couldn't even lean forward to reach the tray-table without squishing him. Forget reaching down under the seat in front of me to rifle through a backpack that was filled with all Asa's favorite stuff in now totally random locations. Nightmare.
Asa did great on both flights, sleeping through the first and looking out the window and watching Nemo for the next. But overall I was hot and sweaty from having him on my lap for three hours and running from one plane to the next. I was hungry because I couldn't access the food. I had to pee because you can't take a toddler with you to those tiny little airplane bathrooms and we had no time between flights. And even though people were complimenting me on how well behaved Asa was, the overall stress of flying alone with a toddler taught me that it's something I really don't want to do again.
I know I am (allegedly) prone to being easily stressed out but I have to think this feeling of exhaustion is universal among parents who have dared to take their toddler on a plane by themselves and I applaud anyone who dares to do this more than once. In the end it was of course worth it, we've tuckered him out with fun every day we've been here as evidenced by the below Huck Finn-esque photo.
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