How to get abducted by aliens

(Betsy should maybe skip this because it's about flying with stupid people.)

So there I was on the plane to Kalispell holding a six-month old, feeling damp from the drool and guilty for failing to buy him his own seat in which to strap a carseat (are they usable as flotation devices? Doubtful.) when the WAAAY over-chatty flight attendant flitted up and perched next to us. I could tell before she even opened her over-lipsticked maw that she was going to Tell Us Something. Turned out she didn't like my Baby Bjorn brand Tobias-carrier thingy.

I figure since he's a lap baby & I'm belted in, he's belted to me- where's the beef?

She actually, and let's just all pause to bask in the insensitive-inanity (it's a word, really) of this, started to talk about how when the plane comes crashing to a premature stop the force of my body will crush him. So I, having similarly taken leave of my senses, engage her in conversation and argue that without the straps I will crush him worse and THEN he will fly tumbling through the air toward the now smoldering nose of the plane where all those businessman bachelors will fail to catch him or save him or even point out how adorable he is while zooming by.

At this point in the (and I use the term loosely) "conversation", her colleague has come up to offer stories of ACTUAL PLANE CRASHES and what HAPPENED TO THE BABIES!!!!!!!!! Sorry, typing too hard, keys getting stuck. As in, "Well, on that United flight that went into the ocean, they rolled the kids up- not the ones with car seats mind you- they rolled them in blankets just like tootsie rolls and put them in the overhead bins because they knew they were going down. What's that? Well, some did and some didn't. My daughter never flies without me buying that ticket for her carseat."

Oh, man. I didn't cry, or swear, or throw anything to test the reflexes of the businessmen in the Baby Trajectory Zone, because I'm somebody's Mother now and it would be embarassing to get arrested. I would have loved to at least take advantage of the complimentary beer but there was a rehearsal the night we arrived. On most of the way home there was an open seat for properly securing our poor neglected endangered urchin of a baby, though none of the attendants were seen rubbing their hands together while hunching over and cackling in anticipation of scaring the crap out of me anyway. May they be cursed with ill-tempered incontinent hard of hearing passengers with Tourettes. Or snakes on their plane.