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At some point around the first year, babies turn into toddlers and make the transition from being totally dependent and insatiable to being verbal and mobile as well. Most experts agree that a sense of order and routine is important to help the young one feel familiar in the home environment.

Of course, when you travel, all of that stuff goes out the window. The practical realities of traveling are often at odds with a baby's familiar routines. Babies do not want to get to the airport an hour before departure time, but until they get organized and raise a substantial amount of lobbying money, they aren't going to see any concessions in this area.

Flying with really little babies is easy. As long as Mommy is on hand, there usually isn't much the father needs to do besides function as a sherpa for the expedition, carrying huge loads of baby-support equpment into hostile environments such as hotel lobbies, truckstops, and relatives' homes.

Once babies become verbal and mobile, you've got another thing on your hands. Keeping a toddler confined to an airplane seat requires more than a backpack full of toys, books, dolls, food and water. You also need a measure of luck, and if your baby is a climber, it is important to have a very understanding person in the seat in front of you.

During this last trip I made a major breakthrough when I discovered, through a very scientific process, that Emma likes to eat ice. My method consisted of having her point at my glass and yell "Ice!" The cubes were too big for her, so I had to fish one out of the glass with my fingers, pop it into my mouth, bite it into pieces of a more reasonable size, spit them back into the palm of my hand and them offer them to her. She would consider the various pieces, nodding and saying "ice" until she made her selection.

This kept the two of us busy but seemed to distract the guy sitting next to me. I could tell he wan't very fond of babies because every time I would spit out some newly-reduced cubes into the palm of my hand he would look over with a pained expression that said he hoped we wouldn't be keeping this up for long.

Some people claim that ice cubes of any size should be considered a choking hazard, but the very fact that it was ice felt like a built-in safety net to me. As long as it isn't a fist-sized chunk, she can't very well choke on it before it melts, right? Even so, in the event of An Episode I could always wrap a blanket around her neck to encourage a faster thaw. Maybe a blow drier aimed at the throat would work even better.

Happily, she didn't choke, and the ice cube routine kept her entertained while keeping her gums numb enough to ignore those molars slowly boring their way through. I was still nervous, though, since flying scares me when I start to think about it too hard, so I borrowed Emma's pacifier. Worked like a charm, although it was just about the last straw for the guy next to me. I shrugged it off as his problem, figuring I did the airline a favor since he bought four drinks during a two hour flight. I wondered how he would have reacted if I'd asked the flight attendant to bring me a blow drier.

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.