Travel – especially air travel – seems to be full of hassles these days. Between endless security lines, fees for everything and non-existent leg room it might be enough to make you think air travel with baby would be just too much to deal with. But before you put away your Ziploc bag with your air travel sized liquids, let us show you just how possible family air travel can be.
You might be tempted to keep baby in your travel stroller to make check-in and going through security easier and faster. However, if Baby can walk, even for just a short stretch, we would highly recommend having them walk through the airport. While your toddler might be slow, and it might take a longer time to complete the process, letting them walk will help burn off energy and get them ready for all that sitting on the plane that babies and toddlers find so challenging.
Car seats and strollers can be checked at the gate. This means you take them with you right up to the plane, then leave them by the door at the bottom of the gangway right before you get onboard. Remember to ask for tags for gate checked items when you check in. Strollers and car seats that are gate checked are bound to get dirty – they’re stored in the hold of the plane, after all. So we’d recommend buying a JL Childress Ultimate Car Seat Travel Bag and a UPPAbaby G-Lite and G-Luxe Stroller Travel Bag for your travel stroller. (You can read about why we recommend getting an UPPAbaby G-Lite for your travel stroller).
Once you’ve reached the gate, encourage your baby or toddler to run around as much as possible. (You can always look for a gate that’s not busy and have your toddler climb on and off chairs, and run around). By the time we get on a flight, our toddler is literally refusing to walk. In fact, before she was old enough to be walking, we would find an emptier gate and chase her around on all fours! Crawling on airport floors will make your child’s pants absolutely disgusting, however. So plan to have them wearing ones you won’t mind tossing out. We were never able to get any of them clean. (Or save them for the next flight!) It’s worth it in the end, though! Tiring them out before the flight will pay off when your baby or toddler doesn’t complain about sitting for several hours in a row!
Plan to bring a sippy cup on board with you. They help minimize spills, which is important when your child will be sitting in those clothes for the next several hours. Flight attendants will fill sippy cups for you – very exciting! To keep that sippy cup from being knocked off the tray table and rolling to who knows where, bring along a Booginhead SippiGrip. (Read this post for more tips on how to keep from losing things while you travel with kids). Just in case they do go missing after all, we bring Even though we bring along Take & Toss Sippy Cups. We also bring plenty of Neat Solutions Bibsters. These disposable bibs help cut down on the inevitable mess and are perfect for travel with baby.
Besides toys, (and more toys, and more toys) on the plane we’d recommend bringing a complete change of clothes for your child – just in case. Also, bring anything your baby or toddler needs to sleep (teddy, blanket, etc.) If your child is old enough to have their own seat, or if you’ve just chosen to purchase one for them, then a CARES can help keep your child safely in their seat without the need to bring along a heavy car seat onboard the plane.
You can never go wrong bringing Ziploc bags. Sandwich bags Small ones are perfect for snacks and stinky diapers you wound up having to change at your seat, along with a million other uses. gallon sized are perfect for keeping dirty clothes away from clean things. Not to mention that you’ll want sandwich sized Ziplocs at your hotel with you. Sticking stinky diapers in Ziplocs will keep your hotel room from smelling like, well, stinky diapers.
Air travel is unpredictable, so we recommend bringing enough diapers for 2 days on board, no matter how short your flight might be. We put ours in a gallon sized Ziploc with the air taken out – just kneel on them while you seal the bag. This way they take up very little room. We’ve had flights delayed till the next day – if you’re stuck in some other city or at the airport or worse – on the tarmac – you’re not going to want to have to go searching for a store that sells diapers. Not to mention trying a different brand of diapers for the first time on a flight doesn’t sound like fun family travel to us. Knowing you have plenty of diapers also means there’s no need to get some right away when you land, which can be stressful.
Many larger planes have changing tables in their bathrooms. These are really helpful, but quarters are still quite cramped. Trying to squeeze yourself and your baby or toddler into the bathroom at the same time is enough without adding a huge diaper bag to the mix (and given all the extra diapers, clothes, toys and snacks you’re bringing, you’re going to want a fairly large one). So, we bring along the fabulous Skip Hop Pronto Changer Diaper Bag for plane changes (as well as taking to restaurants, etc.). We used to have a cheaper version of this travel sized diaper bag, made by The First Years. We got rid of it. The Skip Hop has a strap large enough to go around your wrist – making it truly hands-free. In our experience, baby+airplane=no hands left over for holding diaper bags. You can read more about why we love the Skip Hop Pronto Diaper Changer Kit.
Whether your kids are babies or toddlers, you’ll want a safe place for your child to sleep. We LOVE our Phil & Ted’s Travel Cot so much that we now own two! You can read our UPDATED! Phil & Teds Traveller (Travel Cot) Review to find out more. It’s small enough you could bring it as carry-on luggage when you fly with baby!
Travel is a huge part of our life. Before we had children, we had traveled to over 50 countries together. So, when we became parents, we knew we definitely wanted to continue to travel with kids as well. Naturally, travel with kids is more challenging than travel without kids. Especially when travel with kids is travel with baby. Or travel with toddler. Or travel with baby and toddler…
But before we booked our first plane tickets, assembled the Phil & Ted’s Travel Cot for the first time, or tucked our trusty UPPAbaby G-Lite stroller into its travel bag, there were several things we’d already done to help travel with baby go smoothly. Here are some suggestions to help make travel with kids the best travel you’ve ever done!
1. Establish a bedtime routine you can follow anywhere. Like, at 30,000 feet. Sure, we bought our kids mobiles for their cribs, too. But if your toddler or baby needs that mobile to fall asleep, that’s going to make that overnight flight possibly the longest one you’ve ever taken. The good news is that there are plenty of things that do still work on a plane/train/boat/camel or wherever you may find yourself come bedtime. Music or white noise can easily come along on your phone or mp3 player (and probably doesn’t need to be loud enough to annoy fellow passengers – especially if they understand the alternative!) Bedtime stories are easy to bring along thanks to Indestructibles – the perfect travel books for young kids. Just think twice before you train Junior to fall asleep to stars projected on the ceiling, or something else that can’t come with you when you travel.
2. Get your kids used to taking a shower. Your baby, too! Because cheap budget-friendly hotels often don’t have bathtubs. Not to mention you won’t want your child to use them, anyhow. Bathtubs are less common in other parts of the world, too. (Not to mention that taking a bath won’t be part of your bedtime routine, right? See #1). Both our kids have taken showers since they were about two-months-old. (Or old enough not to be rag-doll floppy). It’s easy, it’s fast and it’s a whole lot better to get them used to it at home than to try it for the first time in some foreign country. After a long flight. Where Junior didn’t fall asleep because he didn’t get his bath…
3. Get your toddler/baby used to sleeping in their travel crib. It’s SO much easier to deal with a skipped or lousy nap at home rather than on the road. Even though the Phil and Ted’s travel cot is wonderful, and we love it, nothing beats sleeping in your own bed, right? So get Junior used to sleeping in it so that they are sleeping in their own bed when you hit the road. Our daughter couldn’t have cared less where she slept (she just didn’t want to at all!), but our son took four days to get used to napping in the Phil & Ted’s. Four very long, nap-less days. Thank goodness we got those out of the way at home and not on the road! Don’t forget to “practice” often. A month is a very long time when you’re a baby/toddler.
4. Expose your child to lots of different kinds of food. Unless spending your vacation trying to hunt down food your kid will actually eat sounds like fun, you’ll want to make sure that Junior gets plenty of chances to explore different foods at home. Remember, there are toddlers all over the world, so what seems unlikely to you is undoubtedly “toddler food” to someone else!
5. Routine, not schedule. This one can be tricky, especially if your kids are in daycare or school and have to get up at a set time every morning. Having been a teacher, Wendy knows full well just how hard it is to break your body of the habit if you eat at exactly the same time every day. A little variety makes it SO much easier to adjust to new time zones!
Remember, practice makes practice! Just like the more you travel on your own, the easier it gets – the more we travel with kids, the more confident we are about doing it. Not to mention that we’re going to feed them, change their diapers and deal with tears no matter what. We might as well do it in an awesome new location!
Parents – do you travel with kids (or braver, travel with baby)? What are your tips for “travel proofing” your child? Have some of these travel ideas worked for you? What have you done to help make travel with kids go smoothly? Please share! We’re always looking for new ideas!
You’re traveling with kids (or even more challenging: traveling with baby) in tow and your travel plans include an early morning flight. Once upon a time, back in the days when it was just two of you, you put on a brave face and staggered out of bed at some ungodly hour to catch whatever flight was the cheapest – right? We certainly did! But now that we have a toddler and a baby, we shudder at the thought of waking them up while it’s still dark out to catch an early morning flight.
The situation is made worse by the fact that we don’t live that close to an airport. San Francisco International (SFO) and Oakland International (OAK) are about the same distance away from us and take us about an hour and a half to reach. Given how early you have to show up at the airport these days; particularly if you travel with kids, not to mention trying to plan for traffic… Basically any morning flight means a very early start.
Now, travel with kids, especially travel with very young children is a daunting enough prospect without throwing in waking them up and going without sleep before you even get started. Close your eyes and picture your ideal family vacation. We doubt very much it includes being stuck in your car, battling morning rush-hour traffic with exhausted kids having a melt-down in the back seat!
What can you do about this problem? Consider staying at a hotel with an airport shuttle the night before your flight. Travel budget already tight and not too happy about having to add the cost of an additional hotel night? It might actually be cheaper! We know, it sounds crazy, but it’s true! Many hotels near major airports offer park and fly deals. Given the price to park your car near the airport (even in an off-airport parking lot), these deals often mean that the night in the hotel is essentially free – and you’re getting breakfast, too!
For example, before an early morning flight to Hawaii we stayed at the Quality Inn in Oakland. At the time, (Christmas 2008) it was $120 for 2 weeks of parking and the night in the hotel with a hot breakfast. Compare that with off-airport long term parking that costs about $10 a day, for a total of $140. Even with the best special coupon rate we could find, the cost just for parking was $100. For us, the extra $20 expense to avoid having to basically lose a night of sleep was a no-brainer!
So, if you don’t live right near a major airport, particularly if you travel with kids and find yourself torn when it comes to booking morning flights, consider staying the night in a hotel the night before. You might just find it’s a much cheaper solution than you might have thought. Not to mention that starting your trip without being completely exhausted and having to put up with sleep deprived (screaming) children = priceless!
(Wondering why we don’t just take public transit to the airport? It’s way MORE expensive than driving ourselves, paying to park AND staying in a hotel for a night. No joke. Sigh).
It is amazing to us just how much more stuff goes along with you when you travel with baby. Or travel with toddler. Or now, when we travel with baby and toddler. It seems the smaller you are, the more things you seem to need. The stakes are often higher, too. Lose your new book you bought to read on the plane? Annoying. Lose Junior’s teddy bear he sleeps with every night? Crisis! So, in light of all the stuff and the potential downfalls of losing any of it, we present to you the best ways to make sure all your travel toys, teddy bears, sippy cups and pacifiers stay safely with you, wherever you may travel. Oh, and your kids, too!
1) Booginhead Pacifier Holder – If your baby or toddler uses a pacifier, this is a must-have. We actually travel with a spare, just in case we manage to lose one! (They do eventually loosen up to the point where they don’t hold on very well. This takes a long time, though). Available in lots of different colors, too. Just make sure to take it off before your child goes through security – there’s enough metal in the clip to set off the metal detector.
2) Booginhead SippiGrip – The easy answer to “Wawa. Wawa. WAWA!" Attach that sippy cup/thermos/straw cup to the stroller and forget it. Especially awesome if your travel umbrella stroller doesn’t have a snack tray. The SippiGrip works great for treasured stuffed animals, too. Because we don’t even want to think about trying to survive without Teddy.
4) Jeep Backpack Harness – You’ve got your sippy cups, your kids’ toys and pacifiers all securely with you – but what about your child? If the thought of letting your kid walk through a busy airport to burn off steam is giving you heart palpitations and you’re waking up in a cold sweat imagining your toddler slipping from your grasp, you need the Jeep Backpack Harness. Cuddly new furry friend and leash all in one – no more worrying about where your child is!
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We have a full sized diaper bag that we love. It’s a great backpack with lots of different pockets. It’s got plenty of room for toys for both our baby and our toddler, along with space for a change of clothes for both kids, too. It’s permanently stocked with a spare blanket for each of our kids, medicines just in case, and extra snacks. (This great travel diaper bag is one of our Top 10 Items to make Travel with Baby Easy and Fun). We love knowing that everything we could possibly need is there and ready to go – but there’s no way on Earth we want to lug that bad boy into a restaurant bathroom with us! Not to mention we couldn’t possibly fit into an airplane bathroom carrying that huge diaper bag. Even just heading out for a walk, it’s great to have a compact diaper bag that just holds the essentials.
So, for times like these, we use our Skip Hop Pronto Changer Diaper Bag This compact diaper bag is perfect for travel with baby or any time you’re on the go. It has a zippered pocket with enough space to hold five diapers for our baby and another 3 for our toddler. There is a mesh pocket that holds a travel pack of wipes plus some diaper lotion ; The Skip Hop also comes with a plastic container to use for the wipes but we find it easier to simply buy baby wipe travel packs travel sized packages and use them straight from there. To us, the plastic box just takes up more room. When the diaper bag is rolled up, there is a front zippered pocket that is easy to access. It’s perfect for hand sanitizer or travel pack of antibacterial wipes , an extra disposable bib and those all important Ziploc sandwich bags (aka the ultimately portable Diaper Genie ).
The diaper changing pad is removable (it zippers to the rest of the bag) and is large enough to still be useful with our now two-year-old who is very tall for her age. It’s coating makes it easy to wipe clean, although we do wish that the outside of the bag was covered with the same material.
Skip Hop advertises that its Skip Hop Pronto Changer Diaper Bag has a built in pillow. It does have a tiny bit of extra padding, but nothing we would consider helpful on a tile bathroom floor, for example. On the other hand, the placement of the diaper compartment is a perfect head rest!
We used to have another compact diaper bag made by the First Years. It was much less expensive, but wound up driving us crazy. It closed with Velcro, rather than a buckle. After a few months of use, the Velcro stopped working, which meant that the diaper bag was constantly falling open. The wrist strap also closed with Velcro, which made us nervous about trusting it hanging from our stroller or off Wendy’s purse. Another thing that we didn’t like was that the strap actually wasn’t a wrist strap. It was only designed to be big enough to go around a stroller handle! The Skip Hop’s buckles are a bit tricky to do up with one hand, but it is possible. Knowing that it’s not going to fall open or off more than makes up for any inconvenience. Also, the First Year’s diaper bag, like many of these compact diaper bags, really smelled badly when we first got it. We left it airing out for a good week and it still smelled strongly of vinyl. We really appreciated that, whatever the Skip Hop one is coated in, it didn’t smell, even right at the beginning.
Overall, we’ve been very happy with the Skip Hop Pronto Changer Diaper Bag and are glad we spent the extra money to get a quality product this time! This is a super useful item we use almost every day and we would definitely recommend one for travel with baby or toddler! (And no, no one has paid us or given us anything for free to say these things. We just really love this product!)
In Toronto with kids? Looking for a warm, dry place to play? We recently decided to travel with kids to Toronto. On a very cold, wet rainy day in Toronto, we needed a place for our toddler to play and burn off some energy. We spent a couple of hours at the Peanut Club, where our kid had a great time. This indoor play space for kids is located at Bathurst and Glencairn (just south of Bathurst and Lawrence). There is off street parking located behind their building. They offer lots of different ways for a kid to let off steam when the weather keeps you indoors.
There is a small area for snacks with child sized picnic tables and highchairs for toddlers and babies. The Peanut Club sells snacks and drinks, but we only stayed long enough to play. There is a bathroom with a changing table. Hooks for jackets are provided and there is space to leave your shoes as the play area is socks only. (Bare feet are not allowed).
There is a large indoor play structure with two slides and multiple ball pits. There is also a wooden bridge, tunnel and pole on this great indoor kids playground. Along with the jungle gym, there is a playhouse, many ride-on toys, a kitchen area and several motorized ride-on toys for older children. Our toddler particularly loved the ride-on train that ran on a track and the giant inflatable tire for jumping.
We spent about two hours at the Peanut Club and our toddler would happily have stayed to play some more. It was a great rainy day activity with kids in Toronto. On weekends they open only for parties. Travel with kids brings you to Toronto? For rainy day play on a weekday, we definitely recommend this great Toronto indoor play space!
Travel – especially air travel – seems to be full of hassles these days. Between endless security lines, fees for everything and non-existent leg room it might be enough to make you think air travel with baby would be just too much to deal with. But before you put away your Ziploc bag with your air travel sized liquids, let us show you just how possible family air travel can be. 
Plan to bring a sippy cup on board with you. They help minimize spills, which is important when your child will be sitting in those clothes for the next several hours. Flight attendants will fill sippy cups for you – very exciting! To keep that sippy cup from being knocked off the tray table and rolling to who knows where, bring along a Booginhead SippiGrip
Air travel is unpredictable, so we recommend bringing enough diapers for 2 days on board, no matter how short your flight might be. We put ours in a gallon sized Ziploc with the air taken out – just kneel on them while you seal the bag. This way they take up very little room. We’ve had flights delayed till the next day – if you’re stuck in some other city or at the airport or worse – on the tarmac – you’re not going to want to have to go searching for a store that sells diapers. Not to mention trying a different brand of diapers for the first time on a flight doesn’t sound like fun family travel to us. Knowing you have plenty of diapers also means there’s no need to get some right away when you land, which can be stressful.
– If your baby or toddler uses a pacifier, this is a must-have. We actually travel with a spare, just in case we manage to lose one! (They do eventually loosen up to the point where they don’t hold on very well. This takes a long time, though). Available in lots of different colors, too. Just make sure to take it off before your child goes through security – there’s enough metal in the clip to set off the metal detector.
– Attaching our 
. But now that our daughter is a toddler, the Secure-A-Toy provides an easy solution to keeping 
– You’ve got your sippy cups, your kids’ toys and pacifiers all securely with you – but what about your child? If the thought of letting your kid walk through a busy airport to burn off steam is giving you heart palpitations and you’re waking up in a cold sweat imagining your toddler slipping from your grasp, you need the Jeep Backpack Harness. Cuddly new furry friend and leash all in one – no more worrying about where your child is! 
; The Skip Hop also comes with a plastic container to use for the wipes but we find it easier to simply buy 
travel sized packages and use them straight from there. To us, the plastic box just takes up more room. When the diaper bag is rolled up, there is a front zippered pocket that is easy to access. It’s perfect for hand sanitizer or 
, an extra 
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