Remember that campy movie, “Snakes On A Plane,” from 2006? The last few days in this house have been more like “Babies On A Plane,” since we’ve been up to our eyeballs in planning our end-of-year trip to England.

We’ve got our destination (The Cotswolds). We’ve got our dates (my wife’s winter break). We’ve even got our rental car. Until last night, though, we didn’t have our plane tickets.

The holdup: L. We’re not taking her as a lapchild this time around, which means we need to buy her a separate seat. Because she’ll only be 18 months at the time of departure, there has been some confusion at Virgin Atlantic over what sort of safety precautions we must take for her to ensure she stays firmly planted in that seat for takeoffs and landings.

Here in the U.S., the solution is simple: You bring your carseat and use it on the plane (as an aside, here’s an interesting post by a friend of mine on this and related subjects).

For international flights, however, it appears the situation is more complex. A number of customer service representatives told us we can’t bring our car seat on board. Other folks have told us we need to use a special safety seat provided by the airline (which I’m not crazy about).

I’m still not sure what we need to do, though we did go ahead and book our tickets last night.

For now, we’ve reserved one of the airline’s special safety seats, and we’re planning to check our car seat as luggage. Something tells me that situation is going to change, since I have a sneaking suspicion the airline-sponsored child seats aren’t designed to protect 18-month-olds the same way they protect older kids.

Have any of you readers had experience with this? If so, what insights can you share? I wouldn’t say we’re panicking yet, but we’d definitely like some advice. And who knows—perhaps the entire incident will end up being fodder for a travel story down the road. Thanks in advance.