Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle) (6 page)

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Authors: Alex McCord,Simon van Kempen

BOOK: Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle)
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Chapter 3
 
The Screaming Kid on the Plane is NOT Mine! (This Time)
 
Traveling with Children
 
Alex
Hotel Bartender Marrakech (HB):
Ce n’est pas possible se d’asseoir avec votre bébé dans la bar.
Moi:
Pourquoi?
HB:
Parce que les gens fument.
Moi:
Mais maintenant il n’y personne a fumer.
HB:
Mais peut’etre c’est possible.
Moi
: J’attends mon mari et mes amis, juste 10 minutes peut’etre. Si quelqu’un entre et commence à fumer, je prendrai le bébé à l’extérieur.
 
(The bartender, convinced that in the 10 minutes I waited for Simon and our friends in the hotel bar someone might come in and blow smoke in five-week-old François’ face, looked at me disapprovingly for the entire 10 minutes. Meanwhile, I enjoyed my glass of Champagne and François slept on, never knowing that he was in the bar to begin with.)
 
Alex, Baby François and a Camel Drive
 
We’ve traveled in every class of service since we’ve been parents, and on pretty much every type of aircraft imaginable, from the six-seater to the largest Boeings and Airbuses. Along the way there have been boats, trains, cars, limos and even a pickup truck or two. Both sides of my family are from Texas, and I grew up traveling between Dallas, Fort Scott (a small town in Kansas where I went to school) and the Caribbean where my family had a house. We’ve taken the boys to Africa, Australia, all over Europe and the States and many, many islands. We’ve obsessively taken pictures of sleeping babies in front of Big Ben, the Sydney Opera House, the St. Tropez Harbor and the Atlas Mountains as proof they were there, because of course they won’t remember the early trips. Our boys have been licked by kangaroos, sniffed by camels, placed sleeping in their car seats under tables during long dinners in France and have played in more than one airplane closet. Once the seat belt sign was off, of course. Maybe.
The thing that really gets me is hearing parents complain about how hard it is to travel with young children. Guess what? They are right; it IS hard. It can be a complete pain in the you-know-what in fact. We get that, but we’ve never let that stop us from going! I was on a commercial flight recently by myself, and the grass is not always greener. When you fly by yourself, there’s no one to watch your carry-on while you go to the bar. What, you don’t go to the bar? Oh, dear. OK, here’s another one—when going through security, you have to deal with everything yourself, and there’s no one to talk to when the inevitable delays occur. Besides, with whom are you going to laugh at the wildly entertaining things you see in the airport, like the completely drunk guy being hauled off by security in one of those little golf carts? At 3:30 in the afternoon. You had to wonder where they were going—the chapel, perhaps? Unless you are driven by limo to a private hangar where your Gulfstream jet is waiting to whisk you away, the act of getting from one part of the world to another has become a lot harder than it was when we were kids. Remember when we didn’t need ID to get on a domestic flight, it was OK to sleep on the floor as long as you didn’t block the aisle and you could congregate near the bathrooms and galleys? These days it’s a very lucky day if our boys get a chance to peek inside the cockpit and wave to the pilots, as opposed to an early memory I have of being allowed to plunk myself down in the copilot’s chair and touch things. That may have been against the rules even in the ’70s, but it was a different time. Point being, with all the security measures designed to
keep us safe, these days the journey is less relaxing than it has ever been. Simon and I have made the decision to keep traveling with the kids, and focus on the destination.
 
François Touring Sydney by Osmosis
 
Australia
Last year we went to visit Simon’s family in Australia, and it was the first time we’d made the trip with both boys. As he is one of four siblings, all of whom get around the globe to varying degrees, they all take turns visiting one another. The last time we’d headed down under was when François was three months old and we’d proudly flown first class on British Airways with our brand-new baby. He slept most of the way and charmed flight attendants when he was awake, one of whom said how much better behaved he was than the infant of an Oscar-winning actress who had been on the same flight the week before. Apparently that one had been a colicky screamer who kept the whole cabin from sleeping.
Fast forward five years and we were off to Oz again, this time on a direct New York/Los Angeles/Sydney run rather than a leisurely round-the-world trip due to work commitments at home. Having just invested quite a lot of money in remodeling our house, the five-figure price tag on four first-class or business-class seats felt like a ridiculous extravagance, and we hadn’t planned far enough in advance to secure seats on miles. We booked ourselves in coach and prepared for the worst. For the first leg, we were due to leave JFK at 6:30 p.m. and land in L.A. at the east coast equivalent of 1:30 a.m. We decided that we’d try to keep the boys awake the whole leg so that they’d pass out on the L.A./Sydney flight. For a week leading up to the departure we put them to bed a little bit later every night, so that the night before we left, they went to bed at midnight and slept until 10:30 a.m. That actually worked really, really well. We also packed each boy a backpack with a DVD player and a few new discs, books, stickers and little 99-cent store toys they’d never seen before and were expendable if lost or broken. We sat in two rows, one adult per child, and it was really great to have forced time to focus on just one boy, have a real conversation and spend time together with no interruptions from the other child or parent.
 
First-Class François
 
Simon
As this trip was after we’d become known to the public and our boys’ behavior or rather unruly behavior had become internet gossip fodder, I wondered whether people would notice them on the flight and watch them hoping for antics. Sure enough, a discussion topic on a parenting website surfaced the day after we arrived in Australia—the husband of one of the moms who frequented this blog was on our flight. He dutifully e-mailed his wife, who was most disappointed that the only thing to report after flying halfway around the world with us was that I made a comment to François about his bag carrying the logo of a recently defunct investment bank, and that Alex’s jeans apparently had a shiny credit card-like thing on her rump. Other moms on the site were desperate for news of our rowdy boys on this 24-hour flight, but alas, as they’d neither been rude nor unruly, her husband said that there was nothing to report. However, his wife did write as a way of an excuse, that her husband took drugs to knock himself out so he would have missed their bad behavior anyway. We can happily report that her drugged-up husband missed no antics—well, from our boys anyway.
 
Alex
On the way back home, we sat behind a family that bought two seats for three kids. I’m all for saving money where you can, but let me put on my how-to hat for just a second and say unless it tips the scale between going on the trip versus staying home, DON’T DO THAT. After our kids were about nine to 12 months old, we always bought them a seat. I would rather get seats for everyone in a cheaper class of service than share a first- or business-class seat with any child big enough to wiggle. Anyway, on the flight from Sydney back to Los Angeles, two of the kids in the family ahead of us were really acting up. The 18-month-old was systematically torturing his parents into insanity, and just when he fell asleep, his sister stood up over her mother on the seat and started banging on the headrest, shouting something that really sounded like, “Die! Die!” It may have been “Cry” or “Hi” or “Pie,” but at that point I’d been awake for so many hours all I could do was cross my fingers that no one would think those temporarily demonic children belonged to us.
Of course in between the flights to and from Australia, we did spend two weeks on the ground there. It was the first trip for Johan and the first trip François was old enough to remember, and we had a wonderful time with family. One thing I hadn’t counted on was a reminder that television can in fact be educational for kids. When we looked out our hotel window in Sydney, both boys immediately recognized the Sydney Opera House and Harbour. François had seen photos of himself there as a baby, but how did Johan know? From watching
The Wiggles
. Far be it from me to advocate TV for kids, but moderation is everything and both Simon and I were tickled to see that the kids knew exactly where they were. They had a little trouble grasping that we couldn’t take a taxi from there to Coober Pedy, but nevermind, at least they knew what it was. That François learned from
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
, an educational film in oh-so-many ways.
Long trips with young children require quite a lot of planning, but when I think back to our early trips with babies, it was really all about knowing how much or little to pack. Comparatively, traveling with an infant was easy. We took François overseas when he was less than two weeks old, and the only drama was making sure we got his passport issued in time. Knowing that in New York City it was unlikely we’d have the official birth certificate by then, we got a letter issued at the hospital confirming the birth, allowing us to get a temporary passport, which was good for a year. It was only after they were out of babyhood and able to walk and talk that flying became a little more complicated. This also coincided with the ever-strengthening security measures each time another terrorist attack was thwarted—and once the boys had tapered off nursing I remembered madly pouring milk and juice into bottles, as it was the only way the liquid would be allowed on board. I drove myself crazy with two backpacks full of drinks and snacks, when in the end taking much less would have been fine. I’ve always silently laughed at people who overpack, but the first few trips away with both boys I completely fell into that trap. After a couple of toddler flights I realized that it’s better to just take what you need for the few hours you’re on the plane, and leave the rest. Either kids will be willing to play with plastic cups, read the exit safety sheet and watch movies, or they will get antsy and scream. Regardless, the flight will eventually be over.

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