The Plunge

Exhaustion is my excuse for being so slow to post this week. Livia is going through a difficult period of waking up, furious every night between eleven and two o'clock, and it takes ages to get her to go back down. I hate to admit it but I have been relying very heavily on benedryl these past few days. I feel more tired than I did when Livia was a small baby, as opposed to the crawling, pulling up baby that she is now. And when I think of the fact that in a few days we will be cooped up a in plane for 9 hours, it makes me feel even more tired. On Tuesday we are all flying to the States to see my parents and take in the beauty of Target and TJMaxx. There is something rather ironic in the fact that after choosing to live so far from home, I now spend large amounts of time and money trying to get back. I view the day of travel kind of like that initial plunge you have to take when you get in the pool. It's really hot and you want to get into the pool, where incidentally, George Clooney is paddling around as well, but the water is just really cold, and you know it won't be pleasant. So you hold you breath and jump in, going deep under the water because when you come up to the surface you will be so glad that you decided to jump in and go swimming with George.
I no longer have pity for people travelling alone, or even for people travelling in couples. In my opinion if you aren't travelling with two small children for more than five hours you really have nothing to complain about. Yes, the seats are small, but have you tried to sit in the small seats with a wiggling 10 months old on your lap so you won't have to pay for a full price ticket? Ever tried to cut up your half frozen Little Debbie cherry cake as the baby grabs for the miniscule cup of water on your tray and manages to pour it in your lap? By now I should be a pro at travelling with small children. Giulio took his first flight to America when he was almost nine months old, and there was some mix-up in the seating and the bulkhead seats were given to someone else. The Italian flight crew felt terrible, Giulio wouldn't be able to take a proper nap (!) and so they gave him a seat all for himself next to me. This was right before he could crawl, and I remember him sitting up in his seat, looking around and seeming so pleased with himself. On the return flight we had an American flight crew, whose attitude towards people who had opted to fly with children was something in the lines of, "You're flying with a baby? That's your f@%##ing problem." Giulio, who in the interveening month had learned to crawl, spent the flight from New York to Milan crawling over our ankles and being pulled back from going into the aisle. He conked out, exhausted, about two hours before we landed. It was the first time that I was so preoccupied with what was going on that I didn't even think about the flight. It was also the first time that I was able to fall asleep on a plane without any sort of a sleep aid.
Fastforward to a year later, with Giulio who stood the entire flight between our knees, wide awake the whole flight to New York. My friend Theresa had sworn by this all natural sleep aide that her own son Luca, (who woke up every night for the first two years of his life,) and had told me that it would knock Giulio right out. I was so convinced that I didn't even bother trying it out, only to find that mid-flight it had no effect on him. Thinking we were underestimating the dose we kept trying to give him more drops, which only had the effect of making him more hyper. That particular trip I flew back alone to Italy alone with Giulio, Lorenzo had gone back a few weeks earlier for work. It had been a long, tiring day and in New York my connecting flight had been late so I had had to run pushing the stroller, while wearing cowboy boots (don't ask) to make the flight. I came aboard, panting and sweating, clutching Giulio and immediately came face to face with some immaculate member of the Alitalia flight crew, the tall, dark, handsome kind of man that makes women decide to move to Italy for La Dolce Vita, and who you never find working in coach. He greeted me with a courteous "Buona Sera" and I just managed to not drip sweat on him. I sqeezed past two newly-weds on the end of the aisle on their way back from their honeymoon in America, holding Giulio and still sweating, and took my seat next to them. Giulio almost immediately started crying. Not weeping, sad, needing comfort crying, but full throated screaming that nothing could stop. Trying to give reassuring smiles to the couple looking warily at Giulio, (it will only be a minute folks! I have no idea why he is doing this!) I did my best to try and comfort him, but nothing worked until I was practically in tears myself. The (luckily) Italian flight crew were sympathetic ("O, che caro! Poverino! Perche piangi?") but nothing could stop the onslaught. I managed to get half of a Melatonina tablet (we had discovered in the States that these made him sleep) down Giulio's throat, making his screams of outrage even louder. At this point one of the flight attendants came over and offered the couple next to me the possibility of two seats in another part of the plane, which they gratefully accepted. Giulio stopped crying, and 15 minutes later he was asleep, passed out on the floor of the plane. The rest of the flight, with two empty seats next to me passed without incident.
Then last November, I did perhaps the bravest-dumbest thing ever. I decided to fly alone with TWO children, with Livia just three months old, and Giulio having just turned three. "It's going to be awful," I told my mother. "Yes, it is," she said, "but you will survive." She was right, it was awful. Not that there was one peak moment of awful, at least not on the plane, but sort of a long sustained note of awfulness that lasted the entire time. That time I decided that I wasn't going to be forcing sleep pills down Giulio's throat. Two days before flying I cut the Melatonina in half, and slipped the halves into two of Giulio's favorite chewy candies, which I then re-wrapped and put in my purse. Moments after the plane had pulled back from the gate I got them out and casually offered them to Giulio who immediately accepted and ate them. I watched him chewing, feigning calm, thinking, He's eating them! He's eating them! Now he will sleep for five-six hours! The men who tried to poison Rasputin, the advisor to the Russian Tzar, must have felt much the same way-- their plan had worked! And yet, as with Rasputin, who in the end had to be shot twelve times, put in a sack and thrown into the river before he died, the melatonina wasn't enough. Giulio slept precisely one hour before being wide awake and difficult in a way that only a three year old can be for the whole rest of the flight. Livia who was still too little to be very difficult, was luckily wonderful, flashing 100 watt smiles at the people in the row behind us, and falling asleep on and off. We had started the flight with a women in the seat next to me, saying she needed to sit in the bulkhead for the circulation in her legs, but who after an hour must have decided that her circulation could risk it, because she moved, leaving us with the three seats to ourselves, so at least I had somewhere to put Livia for some of the time. What saved the day was how truly kind people were, or maybe how pathetic I looked. In New York, after getting off the plane and heading towards customs, I was carrying Livia (jfk keeps all the strollers and only gives them back along with the rest of the luggage), three bags, three coats, and Giulio's carseat which hadn't worked with the airplane seats and had become an albatross around my neck. Giulio, tired, confused, and basically fed-up, demanded to be carried, and when I said I couldn't, collapsed to the floor and refused to move. I was about to collapse too when suddenly I heard a kind voice saying "Can I help you?" It was a women from our Milan flight. She took LIvia, her husband took the car seat, and I took Giulio and so we went on to fight another day, or at least another flight. My mom said that when I came up the ramp where they were waiting for me in Cincinnati I looked like a refugee.
On the flight back home after Christmas, this time thankfully with Lorenzo, Giulio wouldn't keep his tray table up, Livia didn't want to be held and kept wiggling, Lorenzo turned to me and asked, "How did you ever do this on your own?" All I can say is that I must really like Target.
As a p.s. think of me on Tuesday 6/26 and offer up a little prayer to the airline gods that all goes smoothly. This time I am taking Benedryl with me for the kids!