Typed in [airline blankets germs] in Google and found a lot of hits.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/travel/DailyNews/airlineblankets001120.html
I wouldn’t recommend this if the child will be travelling often but you may want to consider Children’s Benadryl. We used it once after a disastrous trip up and our two year old drifted right off and awoke after landing on a two hour flight. It took about 45 minutes to work and we had the flight timed with her usual nap as well.
Again, I wouldn’t recommend this for frequent travel.
Mmm. Judicious use of the likes of benadryl can have a role to play, but be careful. If you’re going to do this, use something the child has had before; some children have a reaction to such things which makes the hyper, and you don’t want to discover this on the plane. Also be aware that sometimes the effect is to make the child tired and irritable, but not sleepy enough to sleep in the stimulating atmosphere of an airplane. This makes matters worse, not better.
Regardless of hygiene, bring the child’s own blanket and don’t use the airline blanket. Familiar smells and feels, that’s what you want.
Many large planes (I believe the 747) have bassinets mounted on the bulkhead behind the kitchen. The child can sleep or play in the bassinet and there is a net which hooks onto the bassinet to hold the child in, in case of turbulence or when taking off/landing. My wife and I have used this several times on long flights (Chicago to Tokyo) and it has proved to be a godsend. Check with the airline to see if the plane you are on has one of these equipped.
Much excelent advice. Thank you all.
Well we made it there and back. It was nothing like as bad as my worst fears imagined. Despite a couple of brief tearful episodes, our little one soon settled down and generally had a happy / sleepy travelling experience.
I am particularly grateful to the fellow travellers who entertained filius minimus with games of peek-a-boo etc. A game with a new friend works wonders!
One thing that worked well for us was one of those mini-magnetic drawing boards. You know, that comes with its own little pen? Hours of fun.
Also, we usually take our own food, just in case. Things that take a long time to unwrap or eat (fruit roll up) are good ideas. We’ve done a dozen or so transatlantic flights and a one transpacific flight, but the worst ones (for us) are the puddle jumpers where just as you get them all settled, it’s time to put up the tabletops and put the seatbelts back on.
I also bought a bunch of very cheap stickers and let her stick them on peices of paper (newspaper). Took forever to get them off the sheet and onto the paper.
My children are long since grown and I am far removed from having to travel with 2-year olds so the only thing I can do is commiserate.
However, other people have done this and survived and one of them, Robert Benchley, even lived to write about it:
“In America there are two classes of travel - FIRST class and with children. Traveling with children corresponds roughly to traveling third class in Bulgaria. … The actual physical discomfort of traveling with the Kiddies is not so great, although you do emerge from it looking as if you had just moved the piano upstars single-handedly. … There is much to be said for those who maintain that rather the race should be allowed to die out that that babies should be taken from place to place along our national arteries of traffic.”
Good Luck!
I told my family that I was never going to travel with the kids (2 and 8 mos) again after a disasterous trip to Chicago and back. I couldn’t get the two year old to stop kicking the chair in front of him long enough to get out any of the cool new stuff I’d brought. I spent 2 1/2 hours holding his feet and getting headbutted and bitten. So my mother buys the kids and me tickets to come to TX. We leave Feb. 3rd. I may just check the kids…