Turbulant Travels

Well, it was bound to happen eventually. After several seamless and relatively painless plane journeys with Forest, we sure had a heck of a time getting to and from Louisiana this time around. We probably started getting a bit too cocky about our travel savvy tot and the airline gods just had to take us down a notch. 

The trip going wasn’t toooooo awful, but it certainly had it’s glitches. We picked flight times that would coincide with F’s normal naptime so that hopefully he would peacefully drift off to sleep for a chunk of the journey. Instead, we boarded the plane only to be told that we would be delayed indefinitely and were stuck on the plane for an additional 2 hours before taking off. 

I used up most of the in flight entertainment before the flight even started taxi-ing.

Since Forest’s naptime fell right in the midst of this delay he was quite grumpy. Something about the altitude and motion of flying seems to lull him to sleep pretty easily, but I knew as long as we remained grounded he would fight his nap and be pretty miserable about it. Unfortunately the guy in front of us took the brunt of the tantrum since Forest insisted on kicking his seat repeatedly until he finally passed out upon take off. 

Plane naps are short at best and lately haven’t lasted longer than 30-45 minutes, but a nap is a nap and we were grateful for a little bit of a break. However, we knew that our delayed leaving time would surely mean we missed our connecting flight in Houston. Since about 40 people on our plane from SFO were also heading to New Orleans, we were worried about even getting rebooked that night and worried we'd have to stay the night in Houston. 

We ended up getting automatically assigned to the 10 pm flight to Nola, which would put us getting to my parent’s place in Covington well past midnight. When we landed we headed straight to the gate of a flight to New Orleans leaving at 7:30 to see if they had any room to spare.  They ended up having 3 seats and were able to accommodate us so we ended up only getting in to New Orleans about 2 hours after we had originally expected. 

We thought for sure our bags would be on the 10:00 flight but were surprised to find out that they were on the 7:30 flight with us so we didn’t even have to wait on that. So in the end, the first leg of the trip wasn’t too disastrous. 

We figured that our return flight, being a 4.5 hour direct flight coinciding with Forest’s bedtime would be a breeze. We arrived to the airport early to have time to feed Forest a big dinner so that he could snooze the whole way to SFO. Hahahaha. About 10 minutes after we were supposed to board we were informed that our flight crew was grounded in Houston with bad weather so our flight would be indefinitely delayed and possibly even canceled. 

Our options were to book the next flight out (in 2 days) or wait it out in the hopes that our flight would leave eventually, getting us to San Francisco in the middle of the night. 

After killing time for 3 hours we ended up boarding around 9:30 and Forest was totally exhausted. We figured he’d go right to sleep as soon as we took off but of course once we boarded we were informed that we were delayed more because they didn’t load our bags yet and had to wait for an incoming plane to land before they could even  start the loading process, so that took another 45 minutes of Forest being completely miserable and crying that he was ‘all done’ and wanted to ‘Go home. Go to room!’ 

We must have finally took off around 10:30 but by that time he was so agitated that he simply could not fall asleep and worked himself into a tizzy of tantrums. Forest is not a good sleeper on the go. He has been totally sleep trained since he was itty bitty which is great but also makes it hard for us to help him get to sleep anywhere other than his crib. I honestly think it’s one of the pitfalls of sleep training. 

Sure it’s super that he falls asleep on his own and sleeps in his crib at predictable times, but when you are traveling sometimes that’s just not possible.  He also has to get to sleep on his own and no amount of soothing on our part can get him there more quickly. In fact the more we interfere, the more agitated he becomes. I’m sure we looked totally neglectful but we know that the quickest way for him to finally nod off is to ignore his protests and let him cry himself to sleep. 

He did finally fall asleep after a horrid tantrum, but 30 minutes later he was back up and miserable again. He would wake up, scream for 5 minutes and then pass out and this cycle repeated itself 4 times. The final time he just could not fall back asleep so we let him watch Super Why for the remainder of the journey. 

He also didn’t sleep a wink on the hour long car ride back from the airport to the house….AT 2 AM. This kid has super human non-sleeping abilities. He passed out in his crib at 3 AM and slept hard til 9 AM but that’s still only 6 hours for a kid who normally sleeps 12+ hours at night. 

We figured he’d take a honking big nap but only slept for 2 hours in the middle of the day. We were all so tired that whole day. Luckily the next night he slept 12.5 hours and must have caught up because he only napped his usual 60 minutes despite playing all morning with his buddies Bryce and Eli. Oh well. 

It was a rough flight and certainly disenchanted us with any fantasies we had about taking any more overnight flights with this kid! We have heard that 1.5-3.5 is the 'no-fun' zone in terms of traveling with kids and I can see that. Mostly he's a champ but the whole 'refuses to sleep on the go' thing is a major pitfall on long trips. Any tips on how we could possibly make that easier for him?