Tomorrow brings with it the delights of boarding a plane with two three-year-olds and a husband who has the waiting-in-the-queue patience of a spooked colt who with haemhorroids but no readily available soothing balms.

The trouble usually starts at check-in: Mr. Z starts tossing his head back with a foam-flecked mouth and showing us the whites of his eyes, half stampeding at the imminent prospect of being enclosed with people he doesn’t know, and is sure he doesn’t like. By the time the clerk asks us if we’ve packed our own bags, no amount of nose-patting or sugar-cube proffering will calm him down. At this point, only an electric cattle-prod and bribery with Outback Steakhouse vouchers will get him to the gate.

Thence, onto the waiting area where we will wait for far too long because I have insisted we get there way too early ‘cos of LA traffic (we live some 80 miles to the north of LA). Mr. Z will calm a little when I give him his nose-bag and put on his blinkers, and will snuffle contentedly in the electronics’ shops until take-off time. I will buy him a computer magazine of some sort and try to reassure him that we will be there soon.

All my mollification will be for nought, though, as they call the row numbers and people, who have no obvious physical handicaps and no under-fives with them, barge their way onto the plane without challenge from the person who attends to such things, and whose proper title I can’t recall right now – sometimes they are very dopey-looking, sometimes not. Once aboard, these bargers-on will remain standing in the aisle of the plane, blocking the way for the people who are trying to get to get to rows 10 through 40, each trying to stuff a small Bedouin campsite, with camels, into an overhead locker.

The biggest challenge of the journey will not come until we are seated and restrained inside the fuselage. It will be a test of a wife and mother’s patience, creativity and grim determination to ensure we don’t get thrown off, before we even leave the gate, for passenger-alarming animalistic squawks and grunts of one sort or another; and then to ensure Mr. Z doesn’t throw cups or make faces at the other travellers.

The lulling sound of the engines usually calms him and he will nod off but, sometimes, I have to use the 6″ hypodermic and some purple stuff to get him to be still for the duration of the flight.

We will then fly. Mr. Z will sleep, for a time, often in a seat far away from the girls and me, so as to disown us if any of us misbehaves and annoys our fellow passengers. Beverages will come and we will spill them. Mummy will take the girls to the toilet, twice each, and eye every surface en route and en-WC with germ-seeking laser-vision and a large pump-action bottle of alcohol hand-cleaning gel stuff. 4 and a half hours will pass.

We will get there. Mr. Z will awaken refreshed and looking like a mere fresh-faced boy and say, “Well that was a good flight, wasn’t it?” I will nod, absent-mindedly picking pieces of play-dough from my hair and putting 4 … no 6 … no 8 wee arms into their jackets – Wait! How many children do I have? “Will you please keep your jackets ON, before mummy tears her hair out and has to be removed by security for profanity in front of minors?”

Actually, the girls are pretty good on planes, for their age. Mr. Z, although I love him dearly and forever, is not good on planes, for his age, or anyone else’s.

*

I’m going to see if I can pack Wocky, my lap-top in our hand-luggage so I can keep on-line in Minnesota but, if not, PCB’ll be quiet ’til then. We’re meant to get back Tuesday lunch-time but, if we’re not too tired, we might go to trivia-night down at the bar so the next post might not be ’til Wednesday. Have a good weekend y’all!

*

If you’ve read this post before I corrected the horrible grammar and typos, but are back to see if your eyes were right, and you did just in fact read the worst piece of blogging you’d seen in a while, well you were wrong. Your eyes were fibbing and the post is grammatically correct and typo free, I think. Now.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 9:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.