[/caption]So last week we did something we've been dreading for months: we flew all the way to the UK with Anya in tow.
In my childless, penny-pinching youth I thought air travel with infants was a great wheeze. Children under two travel free, so this was basically airlines giving away wads of cash: concentrate on the wads of cash and not the "children under two travel" bit, and what's not to like?
Now I'm actually travelling with a wriggling, giggling, crawling bundle of nine month old baby the scales have fallen from my eyes: cut-price tickets are probably the only way that airlines can persuade new parents to travel at all, except in cases of the direst necessity. In addition to which, there's now some fiendishly complex sliding scale of costs for infant flying, so that the old free kids' tickets have gone the way of the in-flight martini and flight attendants who look more glamorous than haggard.
All that said, it actually wasn't too bad. It helped that we set our expectations very low: we all managed to get a few hours of fitful sleep at a few points during the flight, which counted as a triumph against the benchmarks we'd set ourselves. And jetlag was also a bit of a non-event: as my dad pointed out, Anya's asleep 70% of the time anyway, so it's probably less of an upheaval to shift some of that around compared to those of us who only sleep about 30% of the day.
We were given advice before we flew to hand out earplugs and chocolate to adjacent passengers as a sort of bribe or downpayment on expected yowling. In practice, we never got around to it, which was probably a good thing: no amount of chocolate or foam could blot out Anya's protests when she's at full throttle.
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