[kahoxworth]

Any air travel with our son on the second trip was a nightmare.

First, we had a short 1-1/2 hour flight from our son's region to Moscow. Our seats were not assigned together; I had a window seat, my son had the middle seat, and my husband's seat was the aisle seat on the opposite side of the plane. So here we are with this strange Russian man sitting with me and my new son, separating us from my husband. The man spoke no English and didn't understand our pathetic hand gestures asking if he would switch seats with my husband so that we could all sit together. Our son started a screaming tantrum as soon as we tried to fasten his seatbelt and didn't stop until well after the "fasten seatbelts" sign was off. At that time he still had some food issues, where he would panic if he saw food around him and he didn't have any. So when the refreshment cart came around, he again went into hysterics because he saw other people being served beverages. I got him a glass of apple juice and tried to hold it for him because he was so upset he couldn't steady himself, but that only made him more frantic and he tried to wrestle the cup out of my hands, and we both got soaked with apple juice. He was screaming and thrashing so hard that he kept hitting his head on things, which would make him scream more. The entire time, the Russian man next to us was just glaring at me with that "why can't you control your child?" look on his face. I wanted to tell him "I'VE BEEN A MOM FOR TWO DAYS! CUT ME SOME SLACK!"

Our flight from Moscow to JFK was 11 hours, and our son didn't sleep a wink. He screamed the entire time, upsetting everyone around us, and reducing me to tears on several occasions. The changing tables in the plane bathrooms terrified him, so the only way I was able to change his diaper was to have him standing on the changing table facing me, with both arms wrapped around my head while I tried to maneuver around him. There was no in-flight movie for the entire flight and we were going absolutely batty. We arrived at JFK with one hour until our next flight, and we were one of probably a dozen adoptive families on our flight. I grabbed our son and made a mad dash for the front of the plane as soon as we landed while my husband grabbed our carry-ons. Thankfully I was able to be the first adoptive family in line at immigration...otherwise there was no way we would have managed to make our next flight! We had two more flights in the states, from JFK to Dulles and then to Detroit. Our son managed to fall asleep on each of those two flights long enough to be woken twenty minutes later as we're trying to haul him off the plane onto the tarmac, with engines roaring and wind blowing, and he'd start panicking and screaming again.

By the time we finally got to our home that evening, we'd been traveling either by plane or by car for over 30 hours. We were so happy that no one had come to meet us at the airport!!