kenny's first seat on a plane
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
We got lucky on our return trip to Tokyo today. We had three seats between the three of us. The Boy got the use of a seat during his meal!
Anyone who's ever traveled with a child under two knows that the airlines typically don't sell seats to small children. Instead, they hit you up for a 'lap ticket' surcharge and serve a 'meal'.
And anyone who's ever taken a long flight (more than three-four hours) with a small child knows how impossible it is to keep a child of that age entertained for any duration. Which is to say, precisely 100% impossible.
When the meals came, we all were confined by our trays with the little meals teetering upon them. This gave The Boy a priceless opportunity to mess about. I'll abbreviate the thirty minutes that follows with this: they gave him butter.
It had been a tiring few days in Hong Kong, with late (by our standards) nights and lots of activities during the day. During the flight's meal, we were at a fairly low ebb, and with the trays confining us we couldn't entirely jump after The Boy when he did something. So when he slid off his seat underneath his tray to pursue a dropped piece of carrot, we both lost a precious second or two to inertia. And when I'd lifted his tray to pull him out, well, he wasn't there.
I could just make out one of his shoes under the seat in front of him. Scrambling out from under the pile of half-eaten food and various toxic napkins, I got to the row in front of us to discover that he wasn't there, either. The two people in that row looked at me curiously, and I blinked at them in non-comprehension.
Doubling back, I pushed around under The Boy's seat and found that he'd simply taken off his shoes and they'd acted as a decoy while he doubled back under his own seat.
Just when I realized where he must be, one of the men in the row behind us said, "He's coming back!" I looked into that row just in time to see The Boy's stocking feet disappearing. The Boy's head emerged, covered in crumbs of who knows what. I plucked him out and we all had a good laugh at his antics and our .. sub-lightning-speed responses.