Tomorrow we’re off on our holliers!
There was a time, I’d have put a ‘Yippee! at the end of that sentence but not any more as now my anticipation is somewhat tempered by the fact that our traveling party is no longer composed of two persons but of three, and that one of the three is our little two-year-old girl.
Now this two-year-old is a seasoned traveler. She took her inaugural flight at the ripe old age of three weeks, from Melbourne to Sydney, and, at six weeks, she embarked on a transglobal trip from Australia, where she was born, home to Ireland. On these flights she slept like the proverbial baby, waking only to feed and do some cute gurgling and cooing from time to time.
But then, last year, when we went on holiday, everything changed.
On the way out, she was her usual lovely self. Well-rested and dressed in her best, she skipped around the departure lounge in the airport, charming the other passengers, while the two of us sat there, relaxed, browsing through our guidebooks and newspapers, one eye on our delightful daughter, thinking how very nice all this was. What was the problem other parents had with flying with children, we smugly wondered.
Once on board, the airhostesses fought with one another to entertain our darling and even the single man sitting beside us soon lost that hunted look childless people have when they find themselves stuck next to small children on planes. Half an hour into the flight, he’d lain aside his newspaper and was busy playing peek-a-boo with her.
Fast forward a week later, to our return journey, and it was a very different story.
Between one thing and another, the final day of our holiday had been fairly stressful. We’d had a long drive. Bringing back our rental car on time meant we had to be at the airport hours and hours before our departure. The little one had missed out on her afternoon nap. She hadn’t really eaten anything decent all day.
Now it was the middle of the night, or 1.00 a.m. to be precise, not exactly the best time for babies and, just as we were boarding our flight, she lost it. Completely. Spectacularly. The child wouldn’t sit, wouldn’t stay still, wouldn’t be held. She bawled and yelled and stamped her feet. All around, people stared at us and at her; with the sort of pure unadulterated horror normally reserved for ghastly car crashes.
Our sunny little girl had disappeared and in her stead was a monster child. But that her clothes were the ones I’d put her in that morning, I might have suspected that, somehow, we’d picked up the wrong child along the way.
On this flight, there were no broody young airhostess or matronly ones to coochy-coo at the little girl. This time, there were two very frosty ladies who, given the filthy looks they kept throwing us, would undoubtedly have been happier to have had to put up with a mob of drunken, jubilant football supporters than two stressed parents and one cross toddler.
To make matters worse for everyone, rather than seating us in some discreet corner, incomprehensibly we’d been placed in the two inner seats of the centre row – a perfect position from which to cause maximum disruption to the maximum number of people.
The first thing I did, as soon as we were sitting, was give the little one a lollypop. Lollypops had always proved invaluable on planes in the past when they’d smoothed her, stopped her ears from popping during take-off, and helped her to quickly drift off to sleep. This time the lollypop backfired. This time she proceeded to put it everywhere but in her mouth. As she clambered around, it stuck to the floor, to the armrest, to the back of the seat, picking up allsorts: hairs, fluff, nail clippings, whilst leaving a film of stickiness behind it. She stuck it in her own hair, in her father’s hair, in the hair of the man sitting beside me, (or rather on his almost bare bald head) and eventually in my hair where it found its final resting place when she lost interest in it.
At about this point, the airhostess, for whatever reason, offered us the only help she did all through the flight and, disdainfully, held out a dry j-cloth to me. What use she imagined this would be, I have no idea, but I reached out to take it only to be jerked back by my hair which was now firmly stuck to the back of the seat.
The child was now on the floor at my feet, rolling around in split yogurt, digestive biscuit crumbs and juice – food I’d bought on board for her to eat but which she’d decided to play with, while the plastic animals I’d bought for that purpose were now stuck to the arm-rest.
To make matters worse, across the aisle, in their WINDOW seat, sat another family, almost identical to us, mother, father and toddler. But with one big difference. Whereas we were a BAD, BAD, BAD family, they were a GOOD family. As soon as they took their seats, father rested his head against the back of his chair, mother rested hers against his shoulder, and baby snuggled down to sleep.
I spent quite a lot of that flight staring over at them with HATE and, once or twice, perhaps subconsciously disturbed by the intensity of the feeling coming at them from across the aisle, the young mother fleetingly opened her eyes, give us a pitying smile then drifted back to happy sleep.
Four hours later, four hours of cajoling, crying, struggling, singing nursery rhymes, four hours of being tut-tutted at by those around us, four hours of marital bickering, of dragging up every old wound there ever was between husband and wife (with tempers so frayed we felt we might as well put them to good effect), the pilot announced he was coming into land. Right at that very moment, all struggling stopped. I looked down. She’d fallen fast asleep.
Things might have been okay from then on had “they” not decided to put her buggy in with the rest of the luggage just before take-off which meant we had to carry her the miles and miles of escalators and walkways that is Dublin airport, causing her to wake again, crosser than ever before.
Half an hour of queuing for our luggage. Another half an hour of queuing for the first bus to the carpark. Another half an hour of queuing for the second bus when the first one drove off, too full to take us. Yet another half an hour of waiting for the man to come and jump start our car after we discovered our flat battery. Finally, at eight in the morning, we arrived home.
And we’re bringing all this upon us again tomorrow!
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