Bree's 1st Flight

In May we decided that we would take our first real family vacation down to South Carolina to visit with Amy's Aunt Janie and her family as well as see some of the sites around the Charleston area.  Now for those of you who aren't good with geography, Charleston is not exactly next door to Connecticut.  Drive time would be something like 15 hours and that's just way too long for me.  So we decided to roll the dice and fly down there.  Now because I'm cheap, I also decided to roll the dice and not buy Bree her own seat (I like to live life on the edge).  I'll start by saying that things could have been much much worse than they actually were.  Traveling with a baby is always a roll of the dice, sometimes they're fine, other times they're a total train wreck.  And a lot of times there is really no way to predict (although I always try to come up with some scientific research based philosophy to predict how she will react to something, it only works enough times for me to keep convincing myself I can do it).  To get down to SC we had to take 2 separate planes which was actually probably a blessing.  We originally looked for a nonstop flight but just couldn't find any to fit our schedule.  The flights were split pretty evenly (a little over an hour each) with Baltimore being the midpoint where we switched planes.  What we came to realize that Bree can do amazing on a plane for exactly 45 minutes, which is a slight problem when the flight is just over an hour.  For 45 minutes on the first flight Bree did amazing.  We had to have her on our lap as the plane was full, but she was playing with her toys and playing with us just having a great time.  But then the timer in her head went off saying that it had been 45 minutes and was now time for a total meltdown.  As the 46th minute started she just totally lost it.  We tried getting her to go to sleep but apparently it wasn't the most comfortable position for her because she would only doze off and on broken up by high pitched screams.  Off course the screams are to such a volume that the whole plane can hear, so we got a really good idea of how it is to be "that parent" whose kid is just screaming bloody murder.  Thankfully it was only for 15 or 20 minutes, and I have to say that the people on the plane were amazing.  No dirty looks, only people looking at as and nodding saying "we were there a few years ago with our little one". I think anyone with kids has an understanding of what it's like to be "that parent". The second flight went much the same way except that we had an empty seat next to us and I was able to actually get her to go to sleep (although she did scream like crazy for about 5 minutes until she passed out).

The flights on the way back were actually much easier.  The first flight she passed on as soon as we boarded and slept the entire flight.  The second flight she stayed awake and played with the Army chief who was seated next to us.  So we made it through Bree's first flight and it really wasn't all that bad, of course babies love to keep us on our toes so who knows what will happen next time.