Flying with kids

Yesterday my daughter and I flew from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles. We had her two kids with us.

This made me observe how life is as a child.

Think about it. When babies are little we get them ready, put them in a seat and take them everywhere. They are clueless. They get put in a car and wala, they are some other place.

As they get older and get more capable they participate.  They are trusted to get shoes and coats.  They still get led around though.

Now let's think about an airport. It's normally a stressful situation. Just needing to be on time and rush them through the security stampede.  People everywhere.  Bags everywhere. Everyone is in a hurry and have no issue running anyone over.

Back to kids.  The poor children don't know what is going on and their entire day is being told to hold hands, walk faster, slow down, take your shoes off, put your shoes on, so on.

Then we get on the plane and know that our goal is not to be "those" people with kids. We all recognize the "looks".  They start when you cross the invisible line to the gate. Some people are fine. Others just are not happy.

We get on the plane with one of two hopes.  The kids fall asleep, or we have packed enough distractions to keep them occupied. With an hour layover in Minnesota, and having to drag the mound of stuff that we thought was neccesary, with enough time to have the older one take a " few walks" on the people mover "ride."

Then the second leg of the trip. Back to the cattle herding orders for the kids until we were situated in our seats. Back to digging into the bag of tricks that were packed.

All in all the kids were great.

I was thinking about adults wrangling the kids and how kids don't know any better than to just go along with it.

I would like to get in the minds of these little kids and know what they are thinking.  Are they even aware of being pulled, pushed, picked up, put down, asked to hurry and asked to slow down.