Well I guess I can see how parachutes jokes aren’t funny to you, and yes, it’s annoying when perfectly well-intentioned advice gets snipped at … but this is a general interest board, not a parenting/parents-only board. People are gonna toss in their own thoughts and reactions now and then, even if it’s not exactly within the confines of the OP’s original query.
While that’s true, it’s also perfectly acceptable for someone to voice umbrage at jokes about throwing babies out of airplanes.
I left my 3 month old for a long weekend in Grandma’s care. Not a big deal. As you all say, mostly they just eat and sleep at that age.
It’s when they’re screaming in a confined area that the stress begins.
Yeah, I don’t know. Everybody has a different comfort level, of course, but I think there’s a huge difference between leaving a 3 month old at grandma’s for a few days to go a couple hundred miles away (I have no idea where you went, so I’m just assuming a weekend trip was fairly close) and flying to a different continent on the other side of the world for a longer period of time with a baby who is only a little over a month old. If there was an emergency, it would be a hell of a lot harder to get back from Australia on short notice than it would be from an in-country mini-vacation.
Like I said, having done this twice, with kids who were a little older and more mobile, it can usually be done without a lot of trouble. People naturally notice the screaming kids, but I think most babies are pretty calm when flying. When we flew long haul with my oldest, there was a young guy sitting behind us. As we disembarked, he looked at me in surprise and said, “I didn’t even know there was a baby in front of me!”
Plus, frankly, on long haul flights, I think everyone has a different expectation of the trip. My experience has been that people know it’s going to suck, smell, drain you of the will to live, and generally be not nice. I’ve found people to be much more tolerant of all that crap and there’s a general feeling of “we’re all in this together”. I was flying by myself from Australia to the U.S. (4 months pregnant, actually) and the guy beside me just started throwing up all over himself (it was a bit of a bumpy flight). Nobody freaked out or anything - we were all already miserable, anyway.
I find that babies fit comfortably in the overhead bin. No bother until they start leaking.
For me, I’d probably rather turn down a wedding invite than either travel with a 6 week old on a flight that long or leave a kid that young behind.
I think I’ve said this before on the board, but I always liked how they did it in the movie The Fifth Element. Everyone gets on board, settles in, then they gas you into unconsciousness until you arrive. That’s totally the way to fly these days.
How about bringing a extra packet of earplugs and offering them to the passengers around you, in case the baby starts crying??
Or, ask the flight attendant to give everyone a bottle of water, then give everyone a hit of Ecstasy?*
*Just yokin’. Never tried the stuff myself.
C3 and Malthus, as I read the OP, the baby is six weeks old NOW, but will be a three-month old at the time of the potential trip.
Even at 3 months, I’d rather not have either travelled that long with the baby or left him so far away.