Still Traumatized...

So we've been back home from India for a few days now, and only now, this morning, can I even address the nightmare which was our 10+ hour flight home...with Dumpie. He didn't want to sleep - at all - and so while Egg was busying throwing up on three separate occasions onto the stranger next to him, Jay and I were taking it in turns to contain 'The Dumps' and keep him from getting murdered from passengers sat nearby.

We were partly to blame of course for having purchased a 'Night-Time' children's medicine at the airport, lying to the pharmacist in order to get it because it claimed that it 'may cause drowsiness' on the label and we thought we might be in with a chance. Oh no. Turns out that Dumpie is also in that four percentile of children who get the OPPOSITE effect of such medicine and become more hyper instead of sleepy. By the time this was infinitely evident we were well on the way to hell, and stay there we did for the next several hours. The people in front of us wanted us DEAD, and when we finally got off the plane Jay and I were too humiliated to look them in the eye, and just kept our heads down, shuffling off the plane trying to ignore the openly hostile glares.

It wasn't just the screaming that people objected to, for although blood-curdling it might have been excused had we the foresight to post a notice stating that a young Anti-Christ was seated in row 28. However the physical manifestations of boredom and hyperactivity in our two year old were not as easy to forgive. For starters, Dumpie wanted to do leg presses on the the seat in front, and that meant pushing till his little legs were fully extended, causing the person in front to be suddenly pitched forward a few centimetres. He'd then abruptly let his legs bend back towards himself and the person would now find themselves suddenly jerked back to their former position. This went on randomly and sporadically for the better part of ten hours, and I am quite certain that the manic giggling issuing forth from Dumps did nothing to quell their anger.

When Dumpie wasn't doing that he was playing with his meal tray...up...down...up...down....bang bang bang....up...down....etc. And when he tired of that he would stand up on his seat and try and rip off the velcro head protectors from other seats, then clumsily try and re-fix them again. Of course it would be our bad luck that there were no other young children on board to deflect from ours, and that we would be sat in the only window row without a window! (Usually the window shield sliding up and down is enough to keep Dumpie occupied for quite some time, but as it was, we felt claustrophobic and further misery was endured when we discovered that one of our seats was busted and wouldn't recline.)

So you see, every good and perfect thing has to be paid for with something of equally awful value, and for us, our idyllic Indian holiday was sandwiched between two hellish flights of so many hours as to make us lose our minds and the will to live. The only time Jay and I cracked a smile (albeit of horror) was during one of the meals when Dumpie took a dainty nibble from a piece of cubed, refrigerated watermelon, decided it was not to his liking, then before we could stop him, lobbed it straight across the plane where it no doubt fell onto the lap or plate of an unsuspecting passenger. Luckily there was no proof where it came from as Dumpie has a great arm and managed to heave it quite some way.

Last night Jay casually mentioned that he might be going to Mexico for work in a few weeks. When I brought up the idea of traveling with the boys and I to Florida to see Grandpa, and thus sharing the burden of the solo flight with me, he looked at me like I was a moron and said NO WAY! He made it quite clear that he would do anything in his power NOT to fly with us, even if it meant leaving a few hours later from the same airport on the same flight. I got the message. Who can blame him?