In a couple weeks, Ella and I will once again take to the skies. If any of you have been following my blog for a while, you’d know that little miss wiggly pants is a frequent flyer. She has taken six plane trips in the last year, the shortest being two hours and the longest fifteen.

And here I am, about to embark on yet another. Okay, there are some changes. Ella is now going to have her own seat – amazing what a few hundred more dollars can do! She turned two in October so it isn’t an option. The other change is that she will probably behave very badly. She doesn’t nap on planes and will hate being confined to her seat. When she doesn’t get what she wants, she’ll scream and cry in a loud, piercing voice, and I can guarantee that I’ll hear the word “no," at least a hundred times in the almost seven hours it will take us to get to our destination.

I’m sure we’ll also make several trips to the torture chamber (airplane bathroom), where I will try to change her while she screams because the door is closed and there is no room to move. The DVD player that we used to find so helpful in keeping her quiet and content on our first flights will probably bore her in thirty seconds. She will throw toys under the her seat and eat her crayons. And of course she will delight in kicking the back of the seat in front of her.

And speaking of seats, on the second leg of our journey to our destination, the plane is already overbooked and neither of us have assigned seats. Hubby, my very frequent flyer gave me a bored look when I mentioned this, and said, don’t worry, you’ll get seats.

And I’d like to mention that this trip was postponed a couple months ago and I had to pay a $100 penalty for each ticket. Grief! They overbook and then fine you when you postpone a trip, giving up a seat you never had? How do these airlines lose money?

I might as well get right to my major beef: airline travel is stressful, annoying, exhausting and downright uncomfortable, unless you are in first class. At 5’3” my legs are almost touching the seat in front of me and crossing my legs is an act of contortion. If the passenger in front is selfish enough to put their seat back, they are in your lap. Add a toddler into the mix and it is insane! Traveling on a Greyhound bus is a luxury in comparison; you have comfortable seats and leg room, and those bathrooms are bigger. It is such a pity that they don’t go faster and stop at every little town on the way. I think it would take up six days to get to my parents by bus.

I used to love to fly, but that was a long time ago. By the time you get packed, parked, through security and squeezed onto the airplane like toothpaste, you wonder why you ever thought you wanted to travel anywhere. But Ella and I are troopers and will survive this journey, ultimately having a wonderful visit with her grandparents; they make this horrendous trip worthwhile.

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