Traveling With Baby = Stress
Traveling is stressful, let alone traveling with baby for the first time. We recently learned how to make traveling with baby a little less stressful on both baby and parents.
My husband and I just got back from a work trip to Reno, Nevada, where we took our 14-month-old daughter along on her very first airplane trip. There are a few things you have to take into account when traveling with baby.
You Can’t Always Plan For The Unexpected
Sometimes, things just happen, like the Southwest Airline computer glitch that left us getting canceled repeatedly and reshuffled until we decided to get a refund and found an alternate flight on American Airlines.
There are two choices available if you must make a trip and things go haywire with your flight. If you’re close enough you can drive or you can switch flights. We almost drove, but realized that would have been a total nightmare with a 14 month old that hates her car seat as it is. It’s tough on anyone driving anywhere for 8 hours or longer, if you count bathroom breaks.
What to Bring & How to Prepare
- When traveling with baby for the first time, it’s imperative you make sure that baby gets enough sleep and eats before the flight. A hungry and tired baby is a grumpy baby.
- Pack Children’s Tylenol or Motrin in your carry-on. We gave Ariabella some of the former before we left. Her molars are breaking through, so the Tylenol helped with traveling stress and teething discomfort.
- Get one of those cheap, lightweight strollers (this link is just an example of one but you can find them anywhere.) The lightweight stroller is best if your baby isn’t a newborn and is big enough to fit seated in one. Traveling with baby hauling a bulky stroller is cumbersome.
- If you can fit your baby’s clothes in your own suitcase, try consolidating so you’re not lugging around extra baggage, and susceptible to additional fees. We didn’t do this and with our bulky stroller plus all the extra suitcases and carry-ons, it got super stressful. Taking to account that we both had laptops, plus my camera equipment and the baby also had her own carry-on equipped with books, toys, etc. Let’s just say we were over prepared and brought too much stuff. It adds up getting charged for extra bags. Save your money and sanity, keep it simple.
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