My family is a traveling family. My husband travels about 30 weeks out of the year for his job. My daughter went on 16 airplane rides before she was 1 (often times with just me – eek!). I wasn’t going to let having a baby deter our ability to travel. Especially when babies are free to travel up until 2 years old.
Now, is it easy? Heck no! Travel with a baby is tough stuff, but it is completely doable with the right tools.
Here are my top 10 travel tips for traveling with a baby.
1. Try to avoid connections if at all possible. When you have your baby sleeping on a flight, the last thing you want to do is get off and start over again. However, on the brighter side it does give you a chance to get off the plane and change a diaper in non-claustrophobic space.
2. Check everything you can at first. Do not have a carry on suitcase – just pay to check – it is not worth it for your sanity to handle a baby, diaper bag, AND a suitcase. Imagine when you’re trying to stuff that suitcase in the overhead compartment while hanging on to your little one — not worth it.
3. Speaking of, baby items are free to check. Typically for each infant traveling with an adult, you can get up to three infant items checked for free (of course, check your airline’s policy.) We would check a car seat, pack and play, and sometimes our giant BOB stroller. Just make sure you buy some sort of cover for them (duffel bag or specific car seat cover off Amazon.)
4. Carry or roll. I did an Ergo carrier when she still fit in it because I didn’t want to have to bother gate checking the stroller (one less thing to worry about when I was by myself.) However as she got older, we got an easy to fold-up lightweight stroller (I could do it with one hand while holding my daughter.)
5. When you do use a stroller, buy a bag for gate checking. Those strollers are roughed up under the plane. It’s worth it to slip a bag like this one on to protect it.
6. Make sure your food is readily available. When you are going through security for TSA you have to show them your baby food – milk, formula, food pouches…whatever you’ve got. In my experience, they are nice about it unless you forget to give them one, then they search your bag – not fun. Just have everything out so they can put it through a special scanner.
7. Have a boppy. This was an arm saver – especially on long flights.
8. Get an aisle seat. If your baby is like mine, they don’t always want to go to sleep. You can walk up and down the aisles to distract them and for people to wave “Hello!” to your cutie baby.
9. Keep them hungry so you can get them eating when the flight takes off. Do whatever you can to hold off before take off – distract with toys, ABC song, peek-a-boo…do what you can. You want them eating when the plane is rising in the air to help them with their ears. If they’re full and won’t eat, this becomes a problem. And the bonus is they tend to fall asleep on you after eating. OR as they get older, you just continue distracting them with food. I spent an entire flight to Portland handing my daughter Cheerios one by one.
10. Car ride distractions. My daughter hated the car seat from day one. She was not the type to just fall asleep. So on our trip to Colorado last summer, we found sanity in what I like to call the “magic mirror.” It lights up with colors and plays music…AND comes with a remote! So when it turns off and baby start crying again, as you’re driving you just hit the remote and voila you’re babe stops fussing.
This is what worked for our family. Do you have travel tips to share that worked for yours? Happy traveling!
