Tips on traveling with a toddler

In My Humble Opinion
41

Good grief, what kind of inlaws do you have that they cannot put the word out to friends, neighbors and family for any spare pack and play/stroller at their end?
Geez.

I’m pretty certain if you dropped in on any doper house for a vacation, any one of us could outfit your Perfect Child with a playpen, stroller, toys and other assorted goodies, including booze for the exhausted parental units. ( possibly Good Booze, too.)

I’m sorry they have forgotten what it is like to be with kids and travel with them.

Try not to focus on what they won’t do for you, focus on what you can do for yourself and then share in the future, like other Doper parents are doing, to help with some newbie parents burdens.
We flew to Germany two years ago with a 4 and 6 year old and I was loaded for bear. I mean my tote bag ( which is referred to here as a Busy Bag) was jammed for not only 2 eight hour flights ( and two puddle jumper flights) and layovers, but for down time away from zee german cousins. Books, coloring items, magnetic games, loads of books, notebooks and stickers to scribble in.

We packed booster seats and then left them for the cousins (whose kids are the same age but had no boosters and we didn’t want to bother with the damn things on the flight home as we were bringing back buttloads of stuff.)

The flight was a breeze. It was such a shock. NW/KLM had recently upgraded all the cargo…err…steerage…err…cheapseats with monitors and you had a choice of a variety of sterlized crapfestacular flicks, listen to music or play a few lame games. My kids watched Garfield until the Benedryl kicked in. They slept until the landing gear came down. The change of planes went much better than expected, even though I didn’t get a chance to browse in Amsterdam’s schiphol airport shops. On the way home we had just enough time to run like escaped lunatics from the multiple gate changes (always half a continent apart) that we had to get to our final gate and they were boarding already.

What also helps in explaining to your child each step as it happens. " This is our connecting city. We get off this plane and rush over to the gate to get on another plane. We will only have enough time to go potty and stretch our legs. It is important we stick together because it is going to be filled with other people getting off of one plane and running to another plane. your only job is to hold my hand and be on your best behavior. My job is to hold your hand, keep track of the luggage and not lose our passports. " and “This is where we get to pick up our luggage. Half of the fun is watching other people behave like apes at the zoo trying to grab their luggage first. If we wait 5 minutes, it will be a peice of cake.” Kids understand far more that we realize.
Take it one segment at a time and remember to breath. When/if you have more kids, you will look back on this and laugh at how hard you thought it was.

42

Eldest, who is now seven, is still subject to jokes about how he walked from Amsterdam to Atlanta when he was two. He just about did, I don’t think his butt hit the seat for more than a couple of minutes the whole way. The flight attendants were quite nice about it, though I find that now they are far less tolerant of lots of wandering around the plane. Whether this is because of changed policies or because my kids are now older (With one exception I have found that flight attendants extend a great deal of leeway to parents of toddlers) I don’t know.

I agree entirely with your previous points that expectations are key and that the Mommy Radar is likely to zoom right in on parental anxiety about travelling. I am now battle hardened, having done this twice a year for seven years, but then so are my kids. My four year old has the security checkpoint routine down, he knows just what to do just as he knows what to do when his teacher says it’s snack time. So for us it’s different – heck, I think a two parent-one child ratio sounds like a vacation.

I did use a harness on Eldest the year that I had two toddlers. I figured the hell with it, I was travelling through two Very Large Airports and was not going to lose my kid because I was worried about what people might think. I let him pick it out at the store but failed to notice that he picked the same color as my neighbor used for her dog. He got down on his hands and knees and barked his way through Atlanta Hartsfield. A nice older lady at the gate saw me dying a thousand deaths and joined right into his game – she fed him a pretend bowl of water and gave him a pretend dog biscuit.

The following trip he was large enough to push the stroller with his brother in it while I handled the bags which served as an effective leash.

He still has the harness, though, he keeps it with the Superman costume and the swords and shields and so on. He calls it his dog costume.

However, if you decide on a harness, I recommend you get one that fastens in the back, ahem.

I also made an iron on t shirt for each child with a picture of the family on it in the event we got separated. For Eldest I wrote his name and my cell phone number on either his calf or his bicep and told him to go to a mom with kids or airport security if we got separated and show that to them. But with two parents and one child I don’t expect crowds and so on are a real problem.

43

My little toddler is just getting to the stage where she’d prefer to run free than be in the stroller (especially if there’s waiting involved). My eyes are on her at all times, but I just want to make sure she doesn’t dart in front of a cart or something.

I saw a “tether system” that doesn’t look too leash-like (although Lauren loves dogs, so if she thought it was a dog leash, that wouldn’t be a problem for her!) It is essentially two fanny packs (one regular looking one attached via a retractable cord to a little stuffed animal waist pack). Just might do the trick, and it has the bonus of being hands-free.

And, I think I solved my milk/perishables issue. After searching for ice pack replacement ideas, I found this article on Clearwater Seafood in Nova Scotia. Apparently, they are now using frozen peas and corn to pack lobsters for carry-on, and security had no issues with that. Yay!

44

Time change - the kid won’t notice it as long as you don’t make them adjust to the new time zone. Meaning, if your schedule stays in the time zone in which you normally live (or adjusts slowly), then the kid won’t know any differently. We did England this way, and our kids pretty much were OK with this wacky schedule. What would be troublesome is trying to make a 16 month-old adapt to some new time zone really quickly.

You may want to suck it up and make it a 2-day trip each direction. Believe me, if your whole first day there is spent recovering, and if the baby is not presentable anyway, then that day is already shot. Five hours in a car, after being cooped up in an airplane all day, is not going to make a happy camper - but the adventure of a hotel room for one night might be very exciting (depending on how often the baby has done this).

On the crib - in addition to the ideas of pillows/boxes/etc., we sometimes just pulled a dresser drawer, but I’m not now remembering at what ages this worked well.

Also, we never tried the car-seat on a plane thing. These would get checked (agents put them in really big plastic bags), or sometimes we rented them with the car. I’ve always tried to limit the number of separate bags/strollers/babies that are carried, and the little ones seem to do OK in the airline seats.

Good luck.

45

I wish to hell I could make the trip two days each way, but my inlaws booked the flights and are doing the driving and won’t hear of staying in a hotel the day we arrive. It will inexplicably “take away from their time with the baby”. I fail to see how since they would be staying at the hotel with us. It pisses me off, but I guess that’s the way it’s going to be.

We won’t have the option of checking the car seat as per our airline. If she’s under two and has a purchased seat, she is required to be in a car seat. Weird, since if she wasn’t in a purchased seat and was flying for free, she’s could sit on my lap. It’s okay though, because she’s very small for her age and very wiggly and I suspect with just the lap belt she would escape.

46

Sometimes you have to explain that the problems are not with the baby, but with you and not traveling well and not handling the unknown of traveling with a baby.

We get to do Christmas day at our house for my in laws. Our house is much bigger than my mother in laws, the kids are more comfortable here, its just easier - even though its more work - Brainiac4 and his Mom do most of the work anyway.

We always spend Christmas Eve and my parents.

This year, for the first time in many years, my flaky sister is coming home for Christmas. My sister is charismatic and talented - and self absorbed and we spent a week in rehab with her last year trying to get her head back on straight. And there is my grandmother - an 80 year old peice of work who has been driving my mother nuts for 41 years. My mother has taken to saying “this may be our last Christmas with your grandmother.” Most people would have a little regret in their voice as they say that, my mother sounds hopeful. My sister now has two kids - wonderful kids - and my mother, who hoped that her 45 year old husband would grow up once he has kids in the house, has been disappointed. So my mother should be in a passive-agressive state of hell over Christmas - really I can’t wait.

So Brainiac4 was talking about Christmas here, and I fessed up “Lets keep your family thing short, because I’m expecting to be emotionally exhausted after spending time with my family and - as comfortable as your family is, they are still your family and I still have people in my house.”
In your case its a “I don’t travel wel -l without a baby, I’d be exhausted and drained by the time we get to Calgary and not really up to another five hour car trip. If the baby doesn’t travel well, I’m going to need a night in Calgary for my own mental health. I know your parents are excited to see us and the baby, but I’m afraid I’ll be a raving bitch for the whole week if we push this. We can plan on spending the night in Calgary, and if everyone is chipper getting off the plane, cancel the hotel and rent the car a day early.”

47

Well, I would suggest that you grit your teeth if things go poorly, but when the event is over, you enlist your husband to declare very firmly that the next time you will do it your way, pointing out the very real and visible problems that occurred.

(Good luck on that, too, of course.)

48

Does your kid sleep in cars? If yes, then the drive might be good. I don’t know your kid or in laws, but I can say you can go through a hellishly long flight with transfers and complications, and be able to hand off to the in laws. They will be fresh, and excited, and just might do a great job of getting you through that 5 hour flight.

otherwise, as tomendeb says, grit your teeth and wait until after you’re back home to say “that didn’t work for me, next time let’s try…”

49

Don’t be afraid to take advantage of friendly strangers. After all, since the kid isn’t ours, we can get rid of her real fast if we’re not interested in being friendly any more.

Every time I’ve flown across the Atlantic there’s been a few small kids in the plane. We’re talking 12-16 hour flights; it would take the Virgin Mary and a squad of Guardian Angels to get the Baby Jesus to behave, after 3 hours in the airport and more than 10 in a plane. And while none of those flights had Guardian Angels onboard that I could see, all had some friendly strangers who would be happy to chat up a little kid for a while. I always make eye contact with the mother and smile at her to make sure she’s seen me; they usually look a bit worried but it’s more often about the kid being a bother than about me being a Nasty One (it’s the Little Town Cop face all my family has, people always ask us for directions and trust us with their toddlers, and the toddlers trust us too).

The few times I’ve seen parents who wouldn’t let the kid talk with friendly passengers, they wouldn’t accept help from the stewards either and it was much worse.

Forget about villages - sometimes it takes a 747.

50

Kind of hit or miss on sleeping in the car. I think it’s going to be less likely in this case because people will be sitting in the back seat with her.

My MIL couldn’t care less about whether I have a pleasant trip, as demonstrated by a pre-baby visit immediately after I had surgery. The only hope hubby has of convincing her to alter her plans is to focus on the baby. But, I’m not holding my breath. I’m practicing my “I told ya so” dance for after the drive :wink:

I’m absolutely going to let her socialize with friendly passengers and I’m open to accepting help if it’s offered.

I’m on the look out for inexpensive, toddler-friendly travel toys. Hopefully there will be some sales after Xmas.