To their credit, the kids behaved very well in the long 11+ hours plane journey from Bangkok to Amsterdam a few days ago.  The in-flight movies kept them at bay for a few hours, and when they got bored, we distracted them with not-so-healthy snacks, allowed to play with games which we have downloaded on my tablet and kept them occupied with a set of Aqua-Doodle.

Sure there were the occasional fuss about stuff which was annoying, but none too difficult to handle. Sleep was obviously not their priority and I thought that I wasn’t going to be fussing too much if they didn’t, trusting that they would eventually crash when they were flat-out spent. Squirt did better with catching some winks, all in all, close to 5 hours of the total journey. I even managed to watch 3 movies in-flight!

About 3 hours prior to landing, they both fell asleep – the first for Spud in all that flying time – and we had to wake them up before the plane had to land.

I thought I was quite prepared to face anything should the kids conjure up their temper -tantrums mid-air, especially after having to wake them up from their deep sleep. To my relief, both woke up hyper, happy and full of smiles; obviously glad that they were just minutes away from being cooped up in the plane, not a frown in sight.

But! What I wasn’t expecting to react to was when Squirt, with a big smile on his face, started screaming in excitement at the top of his lungs and innocently said out loud, “Mama! We are going doowwwwwnnnn!”

Oooops! Not the thing anyone would want to hear when on the plane; certainly not me especially since I have been jittery about flying of late!

Oooh! I could feel the red flush appearing on my face as soon as he said it, and I managed a smile as I gave an alternative to what he could have meant instead. He looked at me funny and then questioned several times over, “No? Plane not going down?” I had to say No, dear Squirt. The plane’s NOT “going down”, it never will, and it was going to land and descend at the airport’s landing strip.

I’m not sure how many people heard his enthusiastic screams of “the plane going down”, but I assure you that it was just an almost 3 YO chap talking. And that my friends, had been my humble Parenting 101 lesson on teaching my kids of what NOT to say when we were still in mid-air.