Travelling with a Baby

This is never easy, make it in one piece and you’ve done well! I’m going to share my experiences & a few hints and tips which might work for your little one..

Aurora has been abroad twice this year so far, one long haul to Barbados when she was 5 months old, and once to Barcelona this month. The flight to Barbados was surprisingly much easier than we thought, we managed to keep her occupied and because she was a young baby, she was happy sitting and lying down in her sky cot. Even though the trip to Barcelona was only a 2 hour flight, it felt more challenging because of the difficult age she is. She’s obsessed with crawling and moving around, her attention span is still very short and you can’t communicate with her. Between 12 and 18 months I’ve heard is the worst time to travel with children. I was travelling on my own so that made things even more interesting, the most stressful part was collecting the luggage and security!

From my experience my tips would be:

1. Be as organised as you can – I took 2 pieces of hand luggage, a small case which I had a spare change of clothes (thank god because she chose the flight to decide she was feeling very sick!), books, spare bottles, her milk etc. And in my smaller hand luggage I kept all my more accessible things like nappys, wipes, passports etc. Think about what you need the most and keep those things near. Things like a blanket for the plane keep elsewhere.
2. Be minimalistic – you will already be ladened down, hot and sweaty, don’t bother taking things you won’t actually need, like a heavy jacket for yourself, and if you can, only take things you can’t get over there. Most places will always sell wipes and nappys.
3. Think about what will occupy your baby – I took Auroras Samsung tablet with loads of episodes of Mickey Mouse clubhouse because she enjoys that, interactive books which she read for a while. I also went to Poundland and bought a load of random objects and put them in a drawstring back. Because she’d never seen them before she had a ball with them. Babies seem to love everything but the things that are supposed to be for them!
4. If you can book a flight that ties in with nap time, definitely do that !
5. Time babies feed so that on take off and land you can give them their bottle to help their ears pop.
6. Call the airline before hand and make sure you have a front row seat or a skycot if you’re travelling long haul.

 

Hope this helps, deep breath!