Traveling with Baby Chase, His Terrible Parents, and Other Things About Flying That Suck

I'm feeling like a major poop today.

Our flight back (LAX to EWR) yesterday/this morning was suboptimal.

There was a toddler

who would just

NOT

SHUT

UP.

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECHing

into my ear

EHH, EHHHH, EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHH!

for four of the five and a half hours of the flight.

I've never hated a baby before,

but, Baby Chase,

you are on my shit list.

Your useless parents, too.

Your parents should've tried the following:

1) drugged you--there's a lovely thing called Benadryl that makes kids tired 

and miraculously a side effect is that it makes the people around you on a cramped airplane

not want to throw you and your parents off the plane 

or give you something to really be upset about.

::punches fist in palm::

(MAKE NOTE: Sleeping babies are adorable; red, crying ones suck.)

2) apologized profusely to the neighboring passengers, for having terrible luck of having given birth to the Devil's spawn, and bought them DirectTV and headphones and/or alcohol for the flight.

(I saw something like this on TV. I thought it was brilliant.)

3) entertained you more--you were obviously bored, so was I. 

But what did your dumb dad do with his tablet? 

He watched a movie until the battery died instead of playing a dumb game with you.

Which is why your dumb parents should've had some BOOKS.

(I have many recommendations.)

Option three is a bit risky, but if you're averse to drugging your kids,

it's a good option--but only if you're up for the task.

If your entertainment requires sound though, bring headphones for your baby.

I don't want to be listening to some drowsy man sing Twinkle Little Star

every time your kid hits an image of a star or something.

(As a side note: If you're a good person, you don't give kids toys with noise.

You leave it up to their parents to decide 

what obnoxious sound they can tolerate for hours on end.)

I myself am too cheap to do option two though I feel that would be totally baller,

which is why I'd go with option one IF I desperately had to bring a child on a plane.

Which leads to the obvious question of: Why do people bring babies on planes?

My parents always drove to their destination with my siblings and me when

we were too small to reliably behave like humans.

I don't see why more people can't do that.

Anyway . . .

the plane was booked to capacity due to a noon flight

being rescheduled to an hour after our flight took off.

I don't understand why more people didn't just want to wait the extra hour

because what happened was that our flight was an hour late taking off anyway.

The airlines really need to figure out a balance between

not charging for carry-ons and getting everyone's shit on board on time.

Because the Tetris game of fitting everyone's shit into a nearby overhead bin is what delayed us.

(Jon and I checked our bags--squishy backpack-type luggage

that fit BEAUTIFULLY in overhead luggage bins

--because I have free bag-check privileges.)

Also airlines need to figure out how to NOT punish people

who checked their bags and don't have any overhead storage as a result.

(Jon and me.)

Because waiting to leave the back of a plane when you've got all your shit ready to go

for twenty minutes (at least)

with Baby Chase or similar useless people,

who cannot take down their hundred pound carry-on from the overhead bin,

is soul-sucking.

Fact is that sitting at the back of the plane can save your life

(the middle will crack in half and you can fall to your death

and the front of the plane will go up in flames).

But what about the soul-sucking?

What about the

soul-sucking?

Baby Chase,

soul-sucker extraordinaire.