Can any of the doctors around tell me if Dramamine would be more acceptable than Benadryl for knocking the little one out for a few hours? I know that stuff made my son really sleepy - maybe the side effects would be less - er - bad?
CaveMike - good thinking on preparing for the trip home. I’m sure the relatives will have books to give them that we can bring out on the way home.
China Guy - we’ll see if we can put him in a seat without the car seat. We’ll call the airline in advance and see what they have to say about it.
Bizarre and insulting how? From Arnold’s own posts in this thread, he’s flying to Switzerland because he wants to see his family. He also knows that bringing an infant on the plane will more likely than not be a burden on his fellow passengers. By his own admission, he just doesn’t care. And yes, I realize that the suggestion to drive to Europe is a joke.
So I reiterated my opinion, that Arnold should not take a rugrat and an infant on a transatlantic flight.
That said, my post was entirely about this thread. How do you figure it “didn’t have anything to do with the thread”? And how is it threadshitting? Can we only offer opinions that already agree with the OP? If so, what’s the point?
“Don’t fly” is a valid opinion, and I was not the first or only one to express it. You or QED have a problem, take it elsewhere.
(sorry wrong thread)
By the way, Consider splitting the family 2 and 2. My kids are a lot calmer by themselves than together.
Dear God, when I first read this, I missed the word sink. I thought you were scooping water out of the toilet and drinking it.
I was surprised to get to the next paragraph and find that all you’d gotten was a rash.
I think you’ve gotten excellent suggestions so far, Arnold. Well, except for the ones about skipping the trip.
Yes, thanks again everybody for all the good ideas.
Update for those who are interested:
Trip went well. Younger child (22 months) was much less of a problem than I expected. Oldest boy (5) was well-behaved the whole trip. They are very limited in their TV viewing at home so they were fascinated by the personal televisions. The only rough spots were getting the youngest to fall asleep. On the return trip he cried for about 10 minutes before he fell asleep. That was the worst of it. The surprise bags of toys and giving them something to chew on at takeoff and departure really helped. I’m not convinced that giving them an allergy medication to promote drowsiness really made that much of a difference. The little gift bags for passengers in the immediate vicinity, containing earplugs and an apology in advance, were, surprisingly enough, a hit with most of the people that received one! I thought that people would just roll their eyes at that, but no, several people told me “I am glad that you are trying to show some consideration for your fellow passengers” and/or (at the end of the flight) “your children were no problem at all.”
On the other hand, my wife has sworn an unbreakable oath that she never again wants to change flights at Charles de Gaulle airport.
Oh, I’m glad it all went well. And did they have fun in Switzerland?
We had just a short (2.5 hour) flight with our 2 year old, from Chicago to Philly. On the way there, she was just fine with a snack and a juice box (which she doesn’t get at home, so it was a special treat), watched some Elmo on her portable DVD player (a gift from my husband’s employer last Christmas) and another snack and we were there!
While we were there, though, she came down with a cold, so the “drug your kid for a plane ride” debate became incidental. FDA be damned, there was no way I was taking a 2 year old on a plane with a head full of snot - less than two months after she got over pneumonia, no less! So Dimetapp elixir it was, decongestant and anti-histamine, and it did help her symptoms (measured in Kleenexes per hour), and either it or the cold itself knocked her out for the flight home. She coughed some in her sleep, but slept. She woke up just in time to see the lights over Chicago at nighttime - such a great sight! She was so excited once she figured out that some of those lights were cars!
Words to live by.
Did you collect the bags back from them, then?
Glad to hear the trip went well. Novelty does wonders for a while. Be prepared for the next flight 
I’d heard the grim tales and figured they were hyperbole - until I tried this last year. It really was about as bad as I’d been led to believe.
I’m glad it went well, but I wonder if taking it in stages might have helped things? From America to Canada, from Canada to Iceland, from Iceland to Britain, from Britain to Switzerland? This way the children become used to flights.
Glad it went so well. Hopefully, you’ll never have one where it goes badly but what can you do.
Yep. CdG is in fact hell on earth. Thank og for the Eurostar.
Umm, why? I understand from later posts that many have had bad experiences, but what is it about that airport that drives everyone so mad? I’d rather know, because I’m thinking of a trip to Paris as a gift to Mrs Aruns, and I’d better avoid getting our good mood squashed by airport misadventures.
You mean on one trip, change flights 3 times? I shudder at the very thought. For one thing, the children slept about 8 hours continuously. You would have to walk them up several times.
Additionally, with every stop there is a chance of a missed connection or a delay. It’s a recipe for disaster.
I’ve been to Charles de Gaulle several times, and I don’t remember it being as bad as it was this time - perhaps because this time I had two children. Also we made the mistake of having three carry-on bags. Huge mistake! With two adults plus three carry-ons plus two kids plus one car seat we were not having a good time.
Why is Charles de Gaulle (CdG) so terrible? For one thing, I am unfamiliar with the airport, so I’m sure I made several mistakes.
Short story:
Assume you’re changing flights, you might have to do the following - get off the first plane, take a bus from the first plane to the arriving terminal, take a bus from that terminal to the departing terminal for your second flight, go through security, then take a bus from your departing terminal to the second plane. All this is time-consuming.
Long story (what happened to us this time):
From LAX to CdG and CdG to Geneva
As we have done on several flights, we bring the stroller all the way up until the door of the aircraft at LAX and hand it to a flight attendant. (When we’ve done this in previous flights, they handed us back the stroller as soon as we got off the plane. We took a stroller with us to help us walk faster in the airport and also as a “restraining device” for the 22-month-old to prevent him from wandering off.)
We arrive in Charles de Gaulle. My wife says “I hate fighting with people to get off the plane.” Plus we have to unstrap the car seat. So we are the very last people off the plane (big mistake).
At CdG, once you get off the plane, you are somewhere on the tarmac and you need to take a bus to get to the terminal. This bus ride is about 10 minutes or more.
Once at our arriving terminal, we have to switch from terminal 2F to 2E. But first we tried to find our stroller. We try to ask an Air France guy. I’m waiting to speak to him while two people ahead of me are asking him (in English) “how do we get to terminal XXX?” He says “you go this way that way etc.” They say “but we only have five minutes!” The guy answers “You go! You go quickly!” (This has become my new catchphrase for something that needs to get done - I tell my son at bedtime “You sleep! You sleep quickly!”) Anyway it’s my turn and I ask him “where’s my stroller”? He looks at my luggage tags and says “with the luggage on the way to Geneva!”
So we carry the two-year-old to our next terminal. Did I mention that we have to go from 2F to 2E? To go between terminals you have to take a bus. The bus goes throught the airport terminals in order, so we go from 2F back to 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D, finally to 2E. We get off the bus and go through security. Finally we get to the terminal and of course we missed our flight. This was our mistake - we only had 40 minutes between flights and we were told by another Air France lady “it’s virtually impossible to make a connecting flight with only 40 minutes in between.” Luckily for us, from Paris to Geneva there are flights every hour so we can easily get another one. While I’m there, I check with the Air France lady for our return and she says “For the return you have two hours between flights, so you should be OK, unless there’s a strike of course. I hear there might be one. And don’t miss the flight to LA because if you do you probably won’t get on another one until the next day! :)”
From Geneva to CdG and CdG to LAX
I feel more confident since we have two hours between flights at CdG.
We arrive at CdG. Take the bus to the terminal. This time we don’t waste time looking for the stroller because we know it’s with the luggage. Also someone had told me that you can walk between 2E and 2F so we can avoid taking the bus between terminals. We have to pass security to get to the next terminal. But this time a security guy says, pointing to our car seat “What’s this? You can’t take that on the plane!” My wife is hopping mad. I tell Mr. Security that we’ve taken the car seat on Air France flights several times already and no one has ever said anything. He says “go to Zone 3 and get someone from Air France to come and sign for you.”
I run off to Zone 3 to find the almighty car seat approver. I am directed to the “leader.” As soon as I am within one metre of her desk the lady starts waving me away - “the line is over there, this desk is closed!” I explain that I was sent there and tell her the car seat story. She starts by saying “You can’t take that kind of thing on the plane.” (Perhaps she was confused because the car seat is in a child car seat travel bag with wheels - something like this.) I notice that there is a chart on the desk, right in front of me, showing things allowed on the plane, and there’s a picture of a car seat. I say “What about this chart on your desk then?” She says “well I never said you can’t take a car seat on the plane.” I’m about to scream “you just said that!” but being a calm and self-possessed guy I just tell her “you need to come and sign for me at security.” Since she is dealing with all kinds of problems, she says “just a minute”, goes off to a distant telephone and starts having a long conversation about a luggage carousel. In the meantime the Air France employees at the neighbouring desks are waving at me and saying “the line is over there, that desk is closed.” Finally the “leader” comes back and we start going towards security. She says “are you on the 16:30 flight to LA?” “No, the 13:25 flight.” “Well you’d better hurry then!” I had so many answers at the tip of my tongue that I couldn’t pick between them.
We get through security (the “leader” puts us through the first class security line since we’re late). We follow the signs saying gate XXX, and we get to the little subway that’s supposed to bring us to our gate. The 5-year-old is lagging behind and while we’re waiting for him the subway doors close right in front of our nose. I felt sorry for 5-year-old, because my wife was not too happy with him and he was pleading “I can’t run any faster.” Finally we get on the subway, get off on the stop for our gate, run to our gate, and the lady at the gate says “didn’t you hear the announcement? your flight has changed to this other gate at the other side of the terminal!” Never mind that I had checked a TV five minutes before and the TV didn’t show the gate change. It took all three of us (me and my two sons) to stop my wife from leaping over the desk and strangling the Air France employee at the gate.
Good news though, our flight to LAX was delayed one hour so we didn’t miss it.
Are you sure you were in CDG? Except for the buses/subway and the outer space chimes on the paging system, it sounds like Heathrow. Instead of the buses you get to shove along with a billion others on long hallways that had been wider before they put in all that shopping, that no one can do because it’s such a hassle to walk so long to get anywhere, after standing in interminable lines waiting to go through BAA’s 3 lines of security, whose personnel make the TSA seem as loving as Glenda the Good Witch, where you must check that second carryon bag because BAA allows only one carryon through security (hopefully rescinded in January), even though the airline you arrived on and will depart from allow two carryons. That is, if your plane can get to a gate within an hour of landing and doesn’t have as much of a delay on takeoff. Even pilots complain about Heathrow. It’s a horrible welcome to a great country. The British deserve a much better airport experience than this.
Amsterdam is supposed to be a good airport to transit through, thought I’ve never done it. I’ve had good luck in Frankfurt. It’s a great airport to get stuck in, too, if you end up missing your flight.
Forgot to answer this - yes, the kids had a wonderful time. And so did we. Next time, when the kids are older, we’ll do more side trips, this time we stuck close to home and only went as far as Zurich, Lucerne, Geneva for our side trips.
I’m glad your flight went well with the two-year-old! One of the advantages of taking a 12-hour flight with a two-year-old is that, after that, a two or four-hour flight seems like a piece of cake.