Traveling is a lot more tedious and even strategic now that my husband and I are parents. Long gone are the days of worrying about just the two of us. So what if we only have 30 minutes to make our connecting flight! We can just make a run for it…those were the words we use to share with each other. Not so much these days.

We’re very fortunate to have a son that seems to be flexible and willing to travel. He’s a frequent flyer already, having logged his 18th plane ride this weekend. He was flying, and rather superbly I must say, at 2&1/2 months. That doesn’t mean traveling is as seamless as it once was, when it was only my husband and me.

Gone are the days of listening to my iPod, reading a book, or even picking up a celebrity magazine to pass the time while waiting to board a flight. If we have a delayed flight that could cause us to miss our connecting flight, then we have to seriously reconsider our travel, much like we did this past weekend when we were told that we wouldn’t make our flight in Baltimore. In the olden days of just husband and wife travel, we would have just dealt with adding an additional flight through Chicago into our travel, even if that meant arriving at our final destination after midnight. Not the case anymore.

So, we decided to delay our travel by a day, reroute out of our local airport, and take the over $150 in travel vouchers. Of course that meant keeping our little rebel, aka Davey, cooped up in a car for another 2 hours as we drove back home. You can only imagine the amount of energy he had once we finally walked back into our house. It was like holding a wind up toy, winding it to its max, and letting it go.

The next morning we rose before the crack of dawn, 4:30 to be exact, to try our travel again. Take 2! And what we thought would be seamless wasn’t so much the case. Nothing is more excruciating for the parens of a toddler, than watching the seconds click by on the clock as you continue to sit on the Tarmac. Seconds become minutes and minutes quickly add up to a cranky toddler who can’t understand why the plane is not his own personal playground.

And what’s worse is that after the minutes pass by and you’re pushed out from the gate, you hear the pilot state that the necessary little generator needed to actually start the engines is tanked. Yes, that would be correct. We were then pulled back into the gate to fix our issue. My husband and I looked at our watch and realized that we may actually miss our connecting flight this time. What are the odds?

We developed our plan of blocking, quick exiting, and picking up anything we checked at the gate. And when we landed, I was quickly thankful for the fact that I am a runner, that I am strong, and that I’ve managed to stay in shape during this pregnancy because while lugging the extra weight from the baby in my belly, and a 35 pound toddler, I managed to still navigate the airport, stay ahead of my husband, and make it to our connecting flight. Whew!

Needless to say, I think I’m already developing an ulcer as I worry about how we’ll manage this once the second baby arrives.