Traveling with the little one

Mae Zorich (pictured at 6 months) is already a seasoned traveler, along with her older brother, Whit. Parents Katie and Robby take them on family trips to California, Colorado, Louisiana and Georgia.

Buzz Baby is a column about life with babies from the perspective of a first-time mother. If you have baby stories to share, leave a comment under this article at thebuzzmagazines.com or email [email protected].

Traveling with a baby or young child is a crapshoot. I experienced initiation by fire to the “I’ve-traveled-with-baby club” when my husband and I flew for the first time with our 4-month-old (at the time) twins. We headed up north to visit my family.

Two hours before the original flight was supposed to depart, an email arrived on my phone from the airline. “Your flight has been cancelled.” And from there, the fun began.

We encountered one flight cancellation, two airports, two delays and one long flight home. Luckily, we had enough formula and diapers for the endless hours at the airport. A low moment I recall was washing their bottles in the tiny airport bathroom sink with the sensor faucets that seem to never work. I would wash quickly using the sprinkle of water for 15 seconds and repeat.

We finally landed in Houston a little after 1 a.m. We immediately put the babies in a warm bath to wash the day at the airport off of them. The trip wasn’t so funny at the time, but it is now.

Katie Zorich, a nurse and now stay-at-home mom, and her husband Robby, who works in commercial real estate, frequently travel to Santa Barbara and Colorado Springs for family vacations and also to Georgia, Florida and Louisiana to visit family. On a flight home from California, their son, Whit, 9 months at the time, was exposed to peanuts for the first time and broke out into hives. Naturally, Katie panicked.

“They started passing the peanuts around. He didn’t even eat them. I guess they got on my hands,” said Katie. “He started screaming.”

She followed her mommy intuition. “I knew it was topical and not anaphylactic. He has sensitive skin. I knew it was a skin thing, not an airway issue. I didn’t have any Benadryl, so I walked around to the other moms asking them, ‘Do you have any Benadryl?’”

The young mom walking down the aisle with her screaming child caught the attention of the flight attendants, and they intervened. “They keep medicine on planes but they have to go through this protocol first,” said Katie. “They had never had to go through [the protocol] before so no one really knew what to do.”

The flight attendants first got on the loud speakers to ask if there was a doctor on board. Luckily, there was.

“This man, a psychiatrist, stepped forward and he just said, ‘Yes, I think he needs medicine,’ and then they had to call someone on the ground,” said Katie. “It took an hour for [Whit] to get his medicine. Then, 15 minutes later, he was fine.”

Katie says she approaches her packing list differently now. “I used to just take the bare essentials on trips. Now I take a medicine pouch just in case,” said Katie.

Mary Ellis, a financial analyst, was on a smaller commercial plane flying from her hometown of Monroe, Louisiana, back to Houston with her baby, West, when he had a blowout diaper to rival all blowout diapers.

“It covered him completely and me from ‘knees to neck’ as I like to say,” said Mary, laughing.

She took him into the airplane bathroom to change it. “There wasn’t a changing table. I laid him on the floor in the tiny bathroom. I literally had to use paper towel and water to clean it up,” said Mary. “The flight attendant gave me a bag to put it in.”

She returned to her seat to find it had been quarantined by the flight attendant to be sterilized when they landed. “The flight attendant had to ask me to move to another seat.”

Mary said people were giving her dirty looks, but luckily, the couple sitting in front of her found it humorous. “They were cracking up, laughing,” she said.

Unfortunately for her, she did not have a change of clothes for herself. “I had to get off the flight and walk through the airport completely covered in poop,” said Mary. “Lesson learned. I always travel with a spare change of clothes for baby and mommy.”

Mary and her husband James, a director of finance, are now expecting a baby girl in late April. When asked if she’ll fly again when the new baby arrives, she said, laughing, “Maybe.”