1. Travel with a kid who plants his feet and says stubbornly, “No! I WON’T take my jacket off! I WON’T take my shoes off!”
2. Travel with a cute little girl who likes to play hard-to-get. She’ll pretend that she’s walking through the metal detector to you, only to turn around mid-arch and run away.
3. Travel with a kid who thinks he’s being helpful by running BACK through the metal detector to chase after her.
4. But my very best worst lesson of all dates from the pre-kids, full-time liturgy era, and was safely buried in the “Memories that Make You Shudder Whenever You Think Of Them” file, until we had to start explaining to Alex about the TSA and why we had to do EXACTLY what they told us.
We were flying out of Kansas City for a Basi family trip, and they flagged me going through the line. The woman was very cagey about what she had seen in my carryon, but she went digging and digging until she came up with…are you ready for this? A steak knife.
Imagine my horror.
It was an old, cheap, extremely dull steak knife, along with a mismatched fork, that I had been carrying back and forth to work for months to cut tomatoes for cottage cheese & tomato lunches. But at some point I got tired of that lunch and quit packing it. And then I forgot about the knife. And it burrowed its way to the bottom of my bag.
And we flew from Kansas City to Denver, and spent a week in the mountains. Then we flew from Denver to Kansas City, back home. And no one caught it. And I went along in blissful ignorance that I was carrying a great big fat no no in my bag.
Until the day I found myself in a taped-off area of the airport gate, with a police officer measuring the knife to find out if it constituted an automatic trip to jail. Frankly, I think it did, but thank God, they sized up this trembling, frightened, obviously freaked out twenty-something and realized that I was obviously harmless…and they let me go. (Without the knife.)
Since that day, I have become a compulsive bag-emptier before every flight. Even the homebound ones. You never know what you might have thrown into your bag during the trip, without thinking about it.
(Visit Works for me Wednesday at wearethatfamily.com for more useful tips than mine!)
Kathleen M. Basi 
Last night at dinner, a friend mentioned the same thing happened to her when flying to Cancun, but somehow the airports missed it. She carries a medium-sized knife most of the time, and accidentally left it in her purse at the airport. Luckily for her, in Latin America, the airports care more about drug smuggling than weapons, and the Xray machine completely missed it!
Oh. my. goodness! That is hilarious. And yet, if it were me, I’d be horrified. Thanks for posting this. 🙂
Oh, how funny! I would have been so scared. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be getting through security with children.
I would have been freaking out about the knife thing too! Yikes!
We are going flying to Florida in April and I’m glad you mentioned the shoes thing. I want to remember to tell my daughter ahead of time what types of things we’ll have to do when we get to the airport.
Let me first apoplogize for laughing so hard at your misfortune. And then thank you for giving me a smile before bed.
It makes the high of 17 degrees F that I just noticed on our weather forecast much easier to deal with.
That’s funny! ONe summer Mindy came home and she borrowed a duffel bag from Mike’s parents for the return flight. Little did she know her pyro brothers had used it to carry fireworks just days before. She got stopped because her bag had trace explosives 🙂
Omigosh! I feel better now. 😉
LOL I am glad you went ahead and posted this! And I appreciate you stopping by my blog.
Oh wow…I’d have been crying my eyes out in that situation, sure I was going to prison for life or something! LOL