Pond Jumping, Part Three

My time in America was all too short, and the day arrived for me to return back to my house in England. The trip had been full of highs and lows. I got to be home for my father's birthday, my grandmother's birthday, my brother's birthday and the Fourth of July. I got to see some long-lost friends and got some great auntie-time in with my 10-month old nephew. The low end of the journey occurred while on a trip to Buttonwood Zoo in New Bedford. In the UK, a woman is entitled to 52 weeks of maternity leave. My leave ends in August, so I had started communicating with my employer prior to my trip. Mothers in the UK have the right to request flexible working arrangements, including a reduction to part-time hours following maternity leave. I got an email to my phone while at the zoo telling me that my employer can't accommodate my request for a reduction in hours, so I had to resign from my job and will start the hunt for a new one in a matter of weeks.

Our flight left in the early evening, so by early afternoon we had my parents' car packed up and started the drive down 24 to get to Logan airport. The traffic wasn't the worst I had ever seen, but it ate into about 20 minutes of the 3-hour buffer we put in front of ourselves before our flight for Newark left.

One of the more positive things about travelling with a baby is that we get to avoid the naked-scanners and the invasive pat-downs that most travellers get when they fly. We've taken 8 flights since the scanners and enhanced pat-downs came into effect, and the only time we've been subject to either one was a scanner in Amsterdam (just my partner and I – thankfully not our baby). I'm sure this won't last long, and before you know it the TSA and European equivalents will be subjecting my infant son to these scanners.

We weren't able to score my son his own seat on these flights, which in actuality wasn't really needed to start with. The flight to Newark was unusually empty – maybe about 60% full, so he was able to “sit” in a seat between my partner and I on the short trip before the overseas portion of the flight. During the time in America, he had just started to master independent sitting, and he was eager to try out his new found skill as much as possible. So after take-off, we sat him down in the empty middle seat and he occupied himself by making confetti out of the Sky Mall magazine for the 45-minute flight. 

The layover in Newark was somewhat easier than the trip over, but not a synch by any stretch of the imagination. We gate-checked the baby's buggy, but we waited close to an hour before it managed to make the trip from the cargo hold of the plane to the entrance to the gate that we arrived at. We didn't have to re-check our luggage, so the hour we had before the flight left was taken up by having some dinner and driving the buggy around the terminal in hopes that our son would fall asleep in his buggy. The flight to Manchester was delayed by around 40 minutes, so we continued to try and get the baby to sleep, unsuccessfully. By this time it was around 10pm at night, 3 hours past his usual bed-time.

On the plane to Manchester, we reserved a bassinet for the baby to sleep in on the way over. For those of you who have never seen this, it's basically a cot that attaches to the wall in front of the bulkhead row on the plane. We had used it on his first trip to America when he was 8 weeks old. Now, at just over 8 months old, he barely fit into the cot length-wise. We had to convince the air stewardess that he was still safe to sleep in it, since he was 6lbs under the maximum weight limit.  He had a few inches on either side of him, which made it a difficult sleep for him. He tends to roll quite a bit in his sleep, but every time he did while in the bassinet, he woke himself up. So after about 4 hours of sleeping and waking and fussing, he ended up in my partner's lap for the other 4 hours of the journey. The positive side to this is that the bunkhead row has extra leg room, so she was able to sit somewhat comfortably and snooze herself. I've never really been able to get a decent sleep on flights. I'm a stomach sleeper, so the only way I can catch a few zzz's on a plane is to put the tray table down rest my folded arms on the tray, and put my head onto my arms. After about 45 minutes my arms go dead, so my sleep patterns tended to match the baby's while he was in the cot.

We arrived in Manchester in the early morning, and had a pretty simple trek through immigration and baggage before catching a taxi to my partner's office building where we had parked the car for the week. It's gated, so it's safer to keep the car there than it is in our own condo complex that we live in. How my wife manages to stay awake for the 45 minute drive home has always amazed me. By this point in the journey, I have been awake close to 24 hours, so keeping myself sane is a task in itself. Luckily, our son slept most of the car ride home as well.

It took him all of 3 days to adjust back to UK time. My wife did a little worse at 4 days. After 6 days of not being able to adjust and feeling like absolute garbage, I went to the doc to find out I had picked up a bug on the plane, and am just getting over a ear/throat/chest infection as I'm typing out this blog. I'm still going to bed at an hour that most middle-school children can make it past, but I'm hoping to graduate from that soon enough.