The airplane trip

Self-taken picture, outside Cinnabon, Sacramento Airport.

Max outside Cinnabon, Sacramento Airport. Note Delia's expression.

I've always wanted to go back to Colorado in June, and my brother, sister, and several hundred of my parents' friends are all eager to see Max. With a week-long shutdown at work, Colorado was the obvious vacation choice. Except we will be taking Max on an airplane.

Delia did initial assessments of our upcoming theater of operations, and found (a) babies are most likely to cry because of air pressure changes and need to constantly suck on something, and (b) we could just give the kid a sleeping pill. I was aware, through extensive study of and interaction with Max, that (a) save sleeping, he has no off switch, (b) he never took to pacifiers, and (c) he literally can be bored to tears within minutes. Given we will be holding Max in a confined space for several hours, possibilities exist for problems. However, I waved off the sleeping pills. We decided we are finally going to unleash our revenge for sitting next to legions of crying babies, and, grim-faced and with jaws set, we entered the airport.

With that, I present an approximate running diary of our experience.

3:15 PM: Check-in line. We spot a baby ahead of us in a stroller. I am watching in amazement as she peacefully looks around for several minutes sucking a pacifier, as her parents are quietly talking to the ticket lady, almost ignoring the baby. Max has long since tried to push himself out of the stroller, and is now being held. As I watch the other baby, Max is trying to eat the airport line dividers and grab the shirt of the gentleman in front of him.

3:30 PM: Airport security line. See caption below.

Max in security line. He is arching his back and turning in an attempt to escape.

4:10 PM: Max's first incident.

Max outside "Finish Line" Sports Bar, Sacramento. He is holding a $20 organic giraffe hand-painted in France, which he fails to appreciate.

His crying is largely absorbed by the cavernous, noise-filled airport. Whatever ails Max, feeding usually makes him better, so Delia feeds him. I look around. Turning a corner I see, as if an angel lit up a room, a wonderful fluorescent-filled play area, across Gate A14. The carpet, which was cleaned in 1996, undoubtedly carried traces of cocaine, swine flu, arsenic and rodent scat. However, Max needed exercise, so down he went. We used a blanket that Max mostly was able to stay on.

Max and Delia, in heaven-sent play area across Gate A14.

4:50 PM: We board aircraft. Delia is in a window seat. I am in the middle seat, proudly displaying Max to anyone who would want to sit next to us. Amazingly, someone did. His name was Tim, and he had many sets of kids and grandkids.

5:10 PM: Takeoff. Delia attempts to keep Max sucking to relieve air pressure changes.

5:25 PM: Max gets fed. The airplane gives a constant drone. 5:31 PM: Max sleeps beneath a triumphant Delia.

5:41 PM: Our victory is short-lived.

5:43 PM: Max attempts to creep across the airplane seats to Tim.

5:58 PM: Max cries. Thankfully, it is not a scream, but certainly enough to draw attention. Tim volunteers to give us his seat and give Max some room to crawl around - he just needs to find another aisle/window seat. The flight is full. Good luck, Tim.

6:04 PM: Max is fed for the third time in about 45 minutes. Tim returns. Was he just in the bathroom?

6:08 PM: Passengers opposite us. All is quiet.
6:09 PM: Anything to keep him entertained. Anything...

6:12 PM: As shown in the photo below, Max enjoyed trying to eat a cookie wrapper. He was actually quite adorable. People in the airplane are doing something I never could imagine: point at Max and have a smile on their face, at the same time.

6:18 PM: Max suddenly decomposes and screams a battle cry. All is chaos. It was the first time in my life that 50 people lurched around to look at me. Delia attempts to rock and soothe him, which, while instinctive, also works on Max maybe once in every 5,000 tries. He cries harder. In desperation I grab him and start swinging him around, not really in a child-abuse way, but in a, "Hey, we're playing! Isn't this fun?" manner. He starts smiling! I start singing to him, and Tim is clapping in appreciation.

6:18 PM + 45 seconds: Max explodes into a raging scream. Tim mumbles something about giving up his seat and rushes out, his face a textbook expression of utter panic. However, even in the heat of battle, I remember an airplane trip, seated next to an 8-month old. When the baby started crying, the mom vibrated her finger on the baby's lips, so his crying sounded like a helicopter. The baby was fascinated enough to stop crying.

I do the same thing to Max. He instantly becomes more enraged and screams twice as loud (although sounding like a helicopter while doing it). I swing him around again - when he is above me he lets out a scream that carries to the back of the airplane. I am out of ideas. Delia takes Max from me and attempts to feed him again....

Success! Max will weigh about 450 pounds if we keep feeding him at this rate, but we don't care. 10 minutes later, Max utters the wonderful expression, "Ehhh" (Translation: "I am now happy.") Tim materializes again in the aisle seat.


6:40 PM: The Rocky Mountains are always beautiful from the airplane, but is now even more poignant as we reflect that Max will SOON BE OFF THE PLANE!!

6:47 PM: Max wants to grab stuff. Thankfully, Tim is pretty cool about the whole situation and lets Max grab his shirt. Tim gives me stories about his kids, which I completely blank out because I am trying to keep Max's drool off Tim's khakis.

Max can drool on me.

7:15 PM: Success! The plane lands softly, and we soon carried a quiet, grabby Max off the plane. An elderly lady asks me: "Oh, is that your baby? I was wondering what baby kept popping above the seats." Such a neutral comment. Hmmm... was she referring to Max's crying spell? "Yes, it probably was," I answer back.

Max meets Grandma and Grandpa Kaplan (this phrase freaks me out as I write it. Grandpa Kaplan?) Max is attempting to escape from the car seat and/or eat the side.

So there you have it. We reflected later that handling Max on the plane was kind of like a video game - the goal is keep him from crying for over 2 hours in an airplane. It ended up being more entertaining than reading Spirit Magazine.

Wine tour with actual photos of Mommy

I don't try to select photos of Max and myself, but it's very hard not to. Mom is nowhere to be found, despite the fact that she spends way more time with Max than I do. Why is this? Because she's also the only one taking pictures.

So I took actual photos of Delia last week, and am presenting them here. Let's get started.

Max at Smith Vineyards.

OK, technically this photo is of me. Delia took it. So Nevada County, the area in California where we live, isn't known for a lot of entertainment, but there are events that are extremely cool. The Northern Sierra Wine Trail is one of them. Once a year, the wineries in this area open their doors, bring in musicians, and serve lots of food. Perhaps their serving lots of food is a bit of an exaggeration, but we certainly eat lots of the food they serve... For those of you who have been to other wineries, particularly the behemoths in Napa, these wineries are different. The operations are very small, and one winery even operated literally in the garage of a guy's house in Colfax. You'll often find yourself going through 1-lane dirt roads in the middle of a forest to find them. But the settings can be spectacular and the people are usually quite friendly and informal. The wines generally sell only locally, which means you probably haven't heard of any of them. Smith Vineyards has one of the better food spreads, and had barrel tasting as well.

(Useless sidebar: Wineries are often known by their county - Napa County or Sonoma County - and we live in Nevada County - so why are our wineries known as Northern Sierra or Sierra Foothills wineries, and not Nevada County wineries? You might wonder. More likely, you don't. In any case, here's your answer: It's marketing. One of the oldest cities around here, which starts a short walk from our house, is Nevada City, California. Nevada is Spanish for snow. However it wasn't originally called Nevada City, CA - it was called Nevada, CA. Later, the state of Nevada was founded, stealing the proud name of Nevada and forcing our fair city to have the awkward name of Nevada City, CA. We still live in the confusing area of Nevada County, CA. Now, no one wants to go to Nevada County wineries because people (a) don't want wines from Nevada, which is basically a desert, and (b) people, I am guessing, don't want casinos in the tasting room. So there you are.)

Back to the photos:

Here's Delia! A nice lady volunteered to take this photo for us. I didn't actually take a photo, but there is indisputable evidence of Mommy.

OK, let's try again.

Delia and I at a food/wine pairing line at Lucchesi vineyards.

Delia was with me the whole time. I wanted to highlight the forest in the back by contrasting the green with the red canopies in front and...oh, I didn't take this picture either. OK, here we go:

OK, now here's my wife. I took this photo. As I wine taste, Delia's with her beverage of choice (Sprite) - she generally avoids alcohol until she's done with breastfeeding. Max isn't exactly in this photo, but I believe he's in the area.

Delia reading the wine trail pamphlet with Max.

Success! This is an actual photo of Max and Delia that I took.



Another example of Delia and Max. This photo shows the backdrop of Lucchesi. The vineyards are in the foreground and the Sierras are in the background.

This photo shows us picnicking in Solune Vineyards, which is about halfway between Grass Valley and Colfax (on Highway 80 going to Tahoe, which is about 15 minutes from Auburn...ahh, you don't care.) Solune, if you're ever in the area, makes very tasty wines if you're willing to pay for them.

We made it to three wineries. We have extensive photos of the first two, and the third one, Avanguardia, blends Russian graps into white wines. They can actually taste like reds. Very unusual, actually avant guarde....oh, that's the name. Anyway, it was a good setting but we were basket cases by the time we got there. We missed a turnoff, but our GPS navigator told us to make a different turn off the highway. We could barely find the turnoff - it looked like a small dirt driveway. And that's where GPS, and Nevada County, get very interesting.

I think one of the best ways to find the character of an area is to get lost. And, as we took our Honda Civic through increasingly rutted and narrower dirt roads that cut through 10-feet high thorn bushes, we started to wonder who actually lives here. The answer came when we saw a gentleman in his front lawn (loosely defined), smoking marijuana while wearing a football helmet, near a large boiling pot. I think we saw a leg sticking out. Soon, the GPS told us to take a right, which may have been helpful except it required us to mow a tree over. Luckily, there was a place to turn the car around before the dead end. We ended up finding a road with some sign of long-gone pavement, and eventually made it to the winery. Tracing backward, we found the winery was off a major road, but our GPS navigator evidently has a sense of humor.

The buried thank-you blog

A while back, I wrote a thank-you blog to everyone who came to our house to help us when Max was fresh out of the hospital. Then I forgot to post it. So to both of Max's sets of grandparents, and her great aunt (is that right, Allison?) it's no longer a fresh thank-you, more of a frozen and reheated one, but I hope you like it anyway. To find it, go to the blog archive (left hand side of the blog), click on "January 2009" and scroll down to January 11, 2009.