Row 2A
About €2 life upgrades, and a cancelled petting zoo
“Print.”
I almost pressed the print button on the printer this millennial still owns. But I didn’t. We were about to board our first long-haul flight with mini-us and I was feeling reckless.
Turns out there was turbulence.
Some of it happened at 35,000 feet.
The rest happened in my living room.
Luckily, there’s always sardines to throw at a problem.
Hello, I Am Sorry
I considered handing out apology cards when we boarded our first long-haul flight from Amsterdam to San Francisco. Our son was three months old. Not his first flight. Europe trains you for this. This was different. Ten-plus hours.
I wasn’t worried about him. Babies cry. Babies poop. I was worried about everyone else. People had paid serious money for those seats and then we arrived with a stroller, extra bottles, emergency clothes for the emergency clothes, and the confidence level of two people who still checked every twenty minutes whether the baby was breathing.
The flight went exactly as expected. He cried. We stressed. We walked the aisle so often, a passenger asked me for a Bloody Mary. Two spectacular blowouts in a bathroom the size of an air fryer.
At one point, desperate for a break from being the entertainment team, I showed my three-month-old twenty seconds of dancing fruit on YouTube and immediately felt like I’d failed motherhood at a cellular level. I deleted it. The evidence needed to disappear.
Around hour six he started crying for real. Long. Loud. Absolutely committed.
I looked around: Please don’t hate us. I am trying my best.
An hour later he was still crying. At some point I shed a tear too. Not out of sadness. Customer support was overwhelmed.
We landed destroyed. I packed up our travelling circus and realised motherhood had turned me into one large, badly organised bag lady.
The older woman across the aisle smiled. “What a lovely girl.”
We have a boy.
I let her have it.
The guy behind us smiled too. I apologised. He looked confused. “No, your baby is cute.”
All that worrying, and nobody seemed remotely bothered.
Annoying, because I’d spent the entire flight defending myself in a trial nobody had actually started.
Most of the turbulence on that flight was happening in row 2A.
Nobody else seemed to notice.
Bare Minimum
The €2 Life Upgrade
For reasons I can’t fully explain, I’ve become obsessed with sardines.
This week: twice for lunch, twice for dinner.
Here in Barcelona they’re as much a part of life as a cervesa at 11am. €2 for two tins in extra virgin olive oil. I bought six and finally felt like the kind of woman who has her life together.
I throw them in a pan, add whatever vegetables there are, and call it a Mediterranean meal.
Apparently they’re packed with nutrients.
Honestly, I was mostly there for the €2.
Elevator Mom Diaries
Scheduled
I press the elevator button. It's 9:30am, which means we've already lived an entire day. Mini-us and I are heading to the petting zoo, then lunch, then splash pad. The doors open. We step in. I look down and immediately recognise the expression on his face. There are only two forces powerful enough to interrupt my toddler mid-adventure: snacks and a pending bowel movement. I panic-press our floor number again.
Before kids, I thought the baby would adapt to our life. We would continue doing what we wanted, just with a smaller person attached to us. Looking back, I was describing a dog.
I used to roll my eyes at parents who answered every invitation with, “Let me see how the day goes.” The nap schedule eventually humbled me. But what truly runs this household is his daily poop.
Every morning he does one spectacular one on the potty. Miss the window and we’re looking at a diaper incident with the destructive power of a small natural disaster. This morning was different. Nothing happened. Not at 11. Not at 2.
By 4pm, I’d cancelled the petting zoo, postponed the splash pad, and I spent eighty minutes reading books to a toddler on a potty. Lunch was a cheese sandwich. Not the lunch I’d planned.
That evening I looked at my messages.
“Let’s see how the day goes.”
“Can I let you know tomorrow?”
Outro
Ongoing investigations:
Whether the turbulence was on the plane.
Whether six tins of sardines is excessive.
Whether I should have printed the apology cards after all.
- X - Yasmin
See you Sunday, 9:00 CET
6 tins of sardines is just right! Might be too little, if you ask me 😉 smiled while reading your plane story!
I know the feeling of flying with kids. We did our long haul from London to Chicago and she was 9 months. It wasn’t bad at all at the end but we both were so stressed hahhaha! Man that flight of yours what an adventure!