Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle) by Alex McCord, Simon van Kempen Read Free Book Online

complete pain in the you-know-what in fact. We get that, but we’ve never let that stop us from going! I was on a commercial flight recently by myself, and the grass is not always greener. When you fly by yourself, there’s no one to watch your carry-on while you go to the bar. What, you don’t go to the bar? Oh, dear. OK, here’s another one—when going through security, you have to deal with everything yourself, and there’s no one to talk to when the inevitable delays occur. Besides, with whom are you going to laugh at the wildly entertaining things you see in the airport, like the completely drunk guy being hauled off by security in one of those little golf carts? At 3:30 in the afternoon. You had to wonder where they were going—the chapel, perhaps? Unless you are driven by limo to a private hangar where your Gulfstream jet is waiting to whisk you away, the act of getting from one part of the world to another has become a lot harder than it was when we were kids. Remember when we didn’t need ID to get on a domestic flight, it was OK to sleep on the floor as long as you didn’t block the aisle and you could congregate near the bathrooms and galleys? These days it’s a very lucky day if our boys get a chance to peek inside the cockpit and wave to the pilots, as opposed to an early memory I have of being allowed to plunk myself down in the copilot’s chair and touch things. That may have been against the rules even in the ’70s, but it was a different time. Point being, with all the security measures designed tokeep us safe, these days the journey is less relaxing than it has ever been. Simon and I have made the decision to keep traveling with the kids, and focus on the destination.
     

    François Touring Sydney by Osmosis

     
    Australia
    Last year we went to visit Simon’s family in Australia, and it was the first time we’d made the trip with both boys. As he is one of four siblings, all of whom get around the globe to varying degrees, they all take turns visiting one another. The last time we’d headed down under was when François was three months old and we’d proudly flown first class on British Airways with our brand-new baby. He slept most of the way and charmed flight attendants when he was awake, one of whom said how much better behaved he was than the infant of an Oscar-winning actress who had been on the same flight the week before. Apparently that one had been a colicky screamer who kept the whole cabin from sleeping.
    Fast forward five years and we were off to Oz again, this time on a direct New York/Los Angeles/Sydney run rather than a leisurely round-the-world trip due to work commitments at home. Having just invested quite a lot of money in remodeling our house, the five-figure price tag on four first-class or business-class seats felt like a ridiculous extravagance, and we hadn’t planned far enough in advance to secure seats on miles. We booked ourselves in coach and prepared for the worst. For the first leg, we were due to leave JFK at 6:30 p.m. and land in L.A. at the east coast equivalent of 1:30 a.m. We decided that we’d try to keep the boys awake the whole leg so that they’d pass out on the L.A./Sydney flight. For a week leading up to the departure we put them to bed a little bit later every night, so that the night before we left, they went to bed at midnight and slept until 10:30 a.m. That actually worked really, really well. We also packed each boy a backpack with a DVD player and a few new discs, books, stickers and little 99-cent store toys they’d never seen before and were expendable if lost or broken. We sat in two rows, one adult per child, and it was really great to have forced time to focus on just one boy, have a real conversation and spend time together with no interruptions from the other child or parent.
     

    First-Class François

     
    Simon
    As this trip was after we’d become known to the public and our boys’ behavior or rather unruly behavior had become