MCO > LAX with a four-month-old, my mother in the next seat, and an apology to every parent I ever side-eyed.
I am at the gate at Orlando International, about five months postpartum and approximately one Starbucks shy of being human, watching my mom wrestle a stroller-car seat, a carry-on, and a daybag I packed three different times this week, and I have a thought I can’t push away:
God, I see what You did. You humbled me right in my tracks.
I used to be the woman doing the internal eye roll when a baby boarded my row. The one mentally calculating cabin acoustics and the odds of getting through five hours of flight time without a screaming child. Today, I am that woman’s redemption arc.
Five hours. MCO to LAX. My almost-five-month-old daughter, Emilia. My parents — who flew to Florida two weeks ago to watch her while I was at a work trip in Brazil — were heading back home to California with us. Rather than send them home alone, I’d booked myself onto their return flight; I had a conference in Rosarito, Mexico, the following week. The math worked. The pacing — that was a different question.
The flight at a glance — May 2025 · MCO ? LAX · 5 hours · Emilia: 4.5 months old, exclusively breastfed · Travel companions: my mom (next seat), my dad (row behind), Emi (lap, mostly mine)
The flight
My mom and I sat together so we could trade Emilia between us. My dad sat in the row behind. This was technically Emi’s second flight ever — the first was a one-hour trip at 3.5 months old that she handled like a ten-year-old champ. Five hours was a different math problem.
I had pumped two bottles. Packed three toys. A pacifier. A backup pacifier. A backup-to-the-backup pacifier. I had read every “flying with infants” blog post I could find. I had a plan.
The plan, of course, did not survive contact with reality. About forty minutes in, Emi was hungry, and Emi did not want the bottle. Emi wanted the boob — and I exclusively breastfed her until she was just over a year old. So there I was: nursing on an aisle, slightly hunched, half a blanket draped, the flight attendant pretending not to look, the gentleman in the next row pretending HARDER not to look, my mom reading her book like nothing was happening because she has been there before — five times, in fact — and Emi, blissfully on the boob, watching the cabin lights with the calm of someone who has never been anxious about anything in her entire life.
I, however, was on the verge.
In that exact moment — me trying not to inconvenience anyone, hyper-tuned to every shift of Emi’s body, every breath, every twitch of facial expression — Emilia looked up at me, opened her tiny mouth wide, and I braced for the scream.
She yawned.
And I said, quietly, out loud: “Thank you. I needed that.”
I needed the moment of reflection. I needed to remember that my baby is not weaponized at me, and that the world is not actually waiting for me to fail. I needed to sit there, with my baby on my chest, and apologize internally to every mom I had ever silently judged on a plane. I am sorry. I really am. And to twenty-year-old me — solo through Europe, rolling her eyes at the family with the toddler — you owe a lot of women a lot of grace, kid.
Emilia cried for maybe ten minutes of the five-hour flight. I’m exaggerating. It might have been seven.
My dad was fussier than the baby.
Why we were going
I moved from Orange County, California to Orlando, Florida back in 2023. I love it here. I have planted an entire life in this central Florida zip code I never imagined being from — career, marriage, motherhood, a backyard with banana trees that drop fruit onto our patio every September.
But I am from Norwalk, California. I am bilingual because of who raised me. I learned how a kitchen smells when six different things are on the stove because of my mom. And I wanted my daughter — even at almost five months old, even before she could form the memory consciously — to see and feel where I am from. To meet her grandparents on their home turf. To be held by my family and friends. To be surrounded by the kind of bilingual chaos I grew up in. To eat the flautas, carne en su jugo, pozole, carne con chile — all the things my mom makes that I have been trying to recreate in Florida for three years and cannot get right.
Also, if I’m being honest, I was a little homesick for some good old California food and beer — and friends and family.
What we actually did
This was, in my industry’s overused-but-accurate phrasing, a bleisure trip — work plus leisure, generously interpreted.
After the flight landed, my parents took Emi and me straight to the house I grew up in. My dad held her on the bed where I used to nap as a kid. My mom watched Emi with the kind of expression I had only seen on her face a handful of times in my life, and never that softly.
In the days that followed:
Christopher flew out and joined us mid-week, which doubled our extended family time. Emi met his aunt and his cousin.
We took Em to her first Dodgers game. She paid attention to most of it — I’d say she was born a Dodgers fan.
The conference part was a geographic shuffle. I drove down to San Diego with my mom and Emi for a pre-conference meeting. Chris joined us the following day, and from there he, Emi, and I crossed the border to Tijuana — that’s where the hotel was. The conference itself was in Rosarito, about twenty miles further south, so I commuted each morning with the conference team and was back at the TJ hotel by dinner. Chris and Emi held court for the rest of the day. Emi attended zero panels. She came to every dinner.
We ate. Lord, we ate. Tacos on top of tacos — those Tijuana tacos get you. Visited Chris’s cousin’s vintage shop in Manhattan Beach where Chris walked Emi around the racks on his shoulders. Mexican fruit cups so absurdly tall that Chris had to walk back to the car holding both of ours like he was carrying small chandeliers.
The single best purchase I made all year
Buy the Evenflo car-seat-to-stroller setup. I’m serious. The car seat is like a transformer — clicks in and out of the stroller frame in three seconds. You don’t have to wake the sleeping baby to transition from car to airport to gate. Worth every dollar — and every dollar of interest, if you put it on a credit card. Hype is real.
What I actually learned
Flight crews are nicer than your anxiety thinks they will be. Three different flight attendants made eye contact and gave me some version of don’t worry, she’s fine, you’re fine. Nobody on a plane is rooting for you to suffer. They are just trying to get to LAX too.
You can be homesick for two homes. I thought, going into this trip, I’d be filled with that old California pull — the one that wanted me to never have left. What I actually felt, after six days on the West Coast, was a quieter and more surprising thing: I missed Winter Park. I missed my new chaos. I missed my house, my routine, the specific way our room catches morning light. I had moved on without entirely realizing it. I thought I was homesick — and I was, but I was homesick for my Pettus home.
Emilia is more resilient than I gave her credit for. Babies are designed to be portable. The version of motherhood that says don’t take the baby anywhere until she’s two is, for our family at least, not the version we’re going to live.
The thing I wish someone had told me
It is okay for babies to cry on planes.
I have heard this advice my entire adult life, and it did not sink in until I was the mom in the middle seat. Babies cry for the same reason adults sigh — because something inside is uncomfortable, and the body has a way to say so. There is no shame in it.
But under that surface advice is the harder thing nobody told me: it is okay for the mom to feel watched. That feeling is not going to disappear. You are not going to become impervious to it. You will, however, become a person who refuses to let it stop her from going where she needs to go.
I owe a retroactive apology to every woman I ever side-eyed on a flight. The shame of that is real and I’m letting myself feel it. I also owe twenty-year-old me a softer voice — kid, you didn’t know yet. Now you do.
To partners, spouses, and the well-meaning people who love us: you are wonderful. You did not, however, squeeze this bean sprout. The internal chemical reaction that happens to a mother’s body when her baby squirms is unlike anything else in human biology. Add hormones. Add the postpartum anxiety I am still navigating — the work-adjacent kind, the kind nobody warns you about because everybody assumes career women have got their stuff together. I do not. Not yet. That is a longer post for another day.
For now, the message is short: if you are a working mom on a flight with a baby this week, give yourself a huge pat on the back. You are doing the thing.
I see you. We see each other.
i put together the full honest breakdown — what we actually used, what i overpacked, and what earned its permanent spot in the diaper bag. it’s all on the kit.
Find joy in the process. The bean sprout will not stay this size for long.
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