Some of you have noticed I haven't been posting so regularly because of my trip to Hong Kong. Well, I'm finally home (and all you who have emailed me through this blog in the last month and finally got a response yesterday now know why). I don't think any company in the world makes having a baby easier than Microsoft - and the trip to Hong Kong was just a "clever" use of my 4 weeks of paid parental leave. I'm a father. I was never pregnant, and I still get 4 weeks paid leave.
Before I get too much more into my trip, I'd like to take a minute to thank Brian Clevinger for my official Quote of the Day: "Can we try that again, only without the stupid parts this time?" Sariah will attest that I was giggling pretty rampantly when I read that. I don't think she appreciated it as much, but that may be in part due to the fact that she didn't really get the joke before that.
So, flying with a baby across the Pacific Ocean - Going there wasn't too bad. Gwynneth slept through most of the 15-hour flight from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. Then we arrived at about 6:00 AM in Hong Kong, and while she didn't go to sleep that night until about 2:00 AM, that's what she had been doing in Seattle, we couldn't really attribute that to jet lag - she was completely lag-free!
On the way back, Gwynneth basically refused to sleep on the flight from Hong Kong to LA. By the end of it, she was obviously tired, but just not in the mood to go to sleep. While we were waiting in line at LAX, she fell asleep, and slept relatively continuously while we waited for our flight (it was delayed about 2 hours) and on the flight from LA to Seattle. She was so tired (and cranky when she was awake) that we didn't have the heart to try and wake her up, but that was the worst time for her to be getting her sleep. We needed her to sleep early in the other flight and then when we got home.
We got home at around 10:00 at night, and my wife and I were pretty ready to fall straight asleep, but little Gwynneth wasn't. In fact, Gwynneth wasn't ready to go down again until about 10:00 in the morning, which (as Sariah pointed out) is 2:00 AM in Hong Kong. Since then, we've managed to get her down earlier (maybe 9:00 AM), so at this rate, I estimate that she'll be on her regular sleeping schedule in around 2 weeks. The sad thing is that I think we wouldn't have had an ounce of "jet lag" if the baby didn't keep us up. Maybe the term "jet lag" is just something that babies made up so we don't blame them for not being able to sleep normally after a trip (or maybe it was invented by parents who couldn't remember that their sleeping schedule was already messed up).
One other thing that's both nice and annoying if you're traveling long distances with babies is what you do with the baby during the flight. The best case is what we did on our first flight from Seattle to LA - the flight attendant got the person next to us to move up a row and we put her in her car seat in our same row. On the same flight coming back, the flight was full, so we had to just hold her in our laps. On our transpacific flights, we were on 747-400s. On these planes, there are certain rows with no seats in front of them, and on the wall in front of the middle section of those seats (and this could be an airline-specific thing, but I seem to remember seeing them on other planes I've been on), there are these little platforms that fold down in front of the seats, at about chest level (higher than eating trays, which come out of the arms of your seats if you're in these seats). They are about the width of 2 seats (there are two in front of four seats), and the airline has bassinets that they can strap to these platforms for babies to lay in. The catch is that they're not supposed to be in there when the "fasten seatbelts" light is on - instead, they're supposed to be wearing their "baby seatbelt". I suspect the baby seatbelt is an airline-specific thing, because on the way home, the people on our last flight had no idea what they were. Basically, they're like a seatbelt strap with a tangent seatbelt loop that you buckle your seatbelt through, so the baby is seatbelted to your seatbelt.
Some other things should be noted about seats with no seats in front of them. As I mentioned, their eating trays fold out from the arms of their chairs. That's fine with me, even though they seem to sit lower and be a little flimsy, they don't move when the person in front of you reclines. The other thing that's noticeably different is that the TV screens they have on most large planes can't be on the seat in front of you, so instead they come up from under the arm of your chair. When they're folded out, they are on a little pole coming up from one side of you and they come up right in front of you, a little lower than they would be on a seat, but angled so you can still see it fine. Last time I sat in a row like this, the plane only had a projection screen in front of all the seats instead of using little TVs in front of each seat - you only have one choice of movie, but being in that row means you have front-row seats! This time, it wasn't so lucky. It turns out that the place where the TVs end up and the place where the bassinet platform folds to is the same place. And the way that they fold and rotate basically doesn't allow any way to have the bassinet there and the TV in any place where you can see it comfortably at the same time. The end result is that the baby is our in-flight entertainment.
In general, I enjoyed my flying. I'm really bad at sleeping on the airplane (I'm probably just not a regular enough traveler), so I would have REALLY appreciated having a movie or two during the flight, but the airline we flew for our long flights (a Hong Kong-based airline called Cathay Pacific) has some interesting little quirks. We didn't like their service too much on the ground (it seemed like they'd let us board early because of the baby, but they wouldn't tell us that or make a call for people to board with infants and small children like some US airlines do), but things were much better once we were in the air. They have a little area near their kitchens where they just left some cups of water and random snacks (which were swapped in and out during the flight) - peanuts, Tim Tams, biscuits - things like that. I think they called this the "communal snack area" (leave it to a Chinese airline to make everything sound Communist). I'm a fan, though, the snacks were good (I admit, my wife might have snagged a few Tim Tams for the road, since you can't buy them in the US), and having an easy way to get some water when you're on a flight that's a little bit too dry from air-conditioning is almost a necessity.
It gets better - a little-known fact is that you can also call a flight attendant and ask for a Cup O' Noodles. I'm not sure if there are other things available or not, but they go and cook it for you and bring it out with a spill-reducing base, a napkin and a pair of chopsticks. It should be noted, too, that the Cup O' Noodles you get in China is way better than the kind you get in the US, and again, after being in a dry airplane for about 5 hours, it's really refreshing to have some soup and inhale some of the steam from it. Plus, it tastes good.
Anyways, next time I'll talk more about the baby and not her sleeping schedule (speaking of which, I should be mean and wake her up now). Pictures coming soon, too!
