Tomorrow we take a morning flight to Stockholm.  It’s unusual in that we are taking a day flight and not an evening flight, as most airlines going back to Europe do, but that’s the trade-off of taking a direct flight with SAS.

My wife and I are both a bit on edge about this trip.  Mainly I think we are nervous for 1 reason: the little guy, in a plane, not really able to move around, for 10 hours.  The last 2 flights were really not super fun, because he was a crawling machine and wanted to crawl around (this was met disapprovingly by the SAS flight attendants, who I should mention are repeatedly the least baby-friendly crew we have come across).  Now he wants to walk around while holding our hands, so hopefully that will be better for everyone.

So here we are, virtually all packed up, with just the night ahead of us to do our final mental preparations before we take off.  The plan is to let him play, and play super hard, while at the airport.  Get it all out of his system for a while, right?  Then, hopefully he will go down for a longer nap right around takeoff, and then after that, we have an arsenal of books and other things to do.

What does not make matters easy for us is that we want to keep him away from screens (ipads and tv’s for example) at least until he is 2.  He is 13 months now, so that is a long way away.  So we are doing it the old-fashioned way, when the easier way would be to download some good apps or movies, or whatever, and use that in our rotation.

The concern at the bottom of it all I guess is that we do not want to disrupt other people’s journey.  My wife is petrified of this, and I am not really as petrified of it as I used to be, but I still care.  I feel it won’t make it any easier if I am worried about it – all we can do is just be parents to our son, and hope that in that process we don’t do anything disruptive or let our little guy get out of hand with a freak out.  But if he does freak out, we will do the best we can to stop the madness.

I can tell you in case you are going on a flight in the near future that staring at the parents with a look of disapproval and judgement is not helpful.  Flying with a toddler is much more difficult than flying with a baby – they have minds of their own now, and want to explore more than their small bubble around them.  Wish us luck!