Mary Poppins Flies Again...in the Seat Next to Your Child

Well, here's one solution to the much ballyhooed problem of kids misbehaving on planes: get an extra pair of hands to keep the type entertained.

A new site called "Nanny in the Clouds" promises to hook up frazzled parents with experienced childcare workers for the course of an airline flight. The premise is that every plane likely contains such a person--a teacher, a baby-sitter, an experienced mom who'd like to make a couple of extra bucks helping out others. Parents and would-be caregivers register on Nanny in the Clouds, inputting their flight information, backgrounds, salary requirements, etc. The site then acts as a matchmaker between the two.

That doesn't mean that parents are expected to pay for the caregiver's flight. In Nanny in the Cloud's fluffy pink world,  every flight is jam packed with Nanny McFee-types, just dying to make a few extra bucks en route. Its assumed (by Nanny in the Clouds) that several potential babysitters will just happen to be going the same way as struggling families. Parents and nanny work out an appropriate salary for the length of the flight (or from checking to baggage pick up, each arrangement will differ), and voila! A flight all can enjoy

Ahem.

While I admire this "it takes a village" approach to flying, the premise of the site seems far fetched to me. For it to work, it'll need to get a heckuva lot of publicity (I guess I'm helping with that, by writing this blog). And the idea that people on the way to visit their families, or travel for work, or vacation would be willing to go to these lengths to find a job for a few hours seems a tad, well, absurd.

Still, I wish them luck. Anything to get folks to stop complaining about children on planes! (Which I find much more annoying than the children themselves).