A whole lot of travel, both for adoption and for the fun of it, is coming up for people in this blog neighborhood. Mary will be on her way to Ethiopia someday soonish, and Holly is in Zambia now and will be flying home with babies.

We're off to Cambodia soon, not adopting again, but traveling by air with kids, nonetheless.

After a dinner conversation with a friend who just flew home from Australia with a fourteen-month-old last week ... a terrifying account of how the new rules regarding carry-on luggage forced her to jettison almost every comfort food and drink she had so carefully compiled to keep her son happy ... I was inspired to collect as much info as possible on how one does air travel with kids these days.

Let me warn you ... it's not a pretty picture the US government's Transportation Security Administration paints for mothers and fathers about to wing their way across the globe.

After assuring that parents will never be asked to do anything that will separate them from their child ... and warning that leaving babies in carriers as they pass through the x-ray machine on the conveyer belt is a bad idea ... the TSA website goes on to list all the no-nos and yes-yeses, albeit with their clever 3-1-1 slogan.

3-1-1 for carry-ons = 3 ounce bottle or less; 1 quart-sized, clear, plastic, zip-top bag; 1 bag per passenger placed in screening bin. One-quart bag per person limits the total liquid volume each traveler can bring. 3 oz. container size is a security measure.

Okay. That's about as clear as a ziplock full of items of vital necessity, isn't it?

So, three ounces of liquid ... 100 mls (I live in a metric world). Considering that one tetra-pak of mango juice contains 250mls ... and one tetra-pak of mango juice will last all of about forty-five seconds in the case of my two-year-old ... we're allowed little more than a sip. But not in the tetra-pak because it holds too much, and it doesn't come in anything smaller.

If it's yogurt that will please Junior, you may have trouble finding those that come in less that 125ml containers, too.

What to do? For ideas, see the next post.