After taking our 3 month old baby home to Australia to meet everyone (and to attend a fabulous wedding in Wanaka), we returned back to the UK with our 4 month old baby and a world of knowledge about travelling with infants!! Wander Mum has some great little tips on flying with infants too, many of the tips we used and helped our trip immensely.
From this experience my tips would be:
From this experience my tips would be:
- If you are breastfeeding you will find travelling a breeze! Simply nurse on ascent and descent and the baby won't get air pressure troubles. I was not allowed to nurse on one of our flights as the ridiculous air hostess insisted the baby needed to be sitting upright in the forward facing position! She couldn't sit yet but anyway, it was a miserable flight because the poor little darling had ear pains due to no nursing.
- If you aren't nursing, have a bottle of milk ready for the same period, because babies can't pop their own ears, so the sucking motion helps with the pressure change.
- Pack however nappies you would normally need in the amount of time you'll be in transit, and then add another few too, just incase.
- Pack a change of clothes. For baby and for you! If you are doing a 14 hour leg and you've got baby vomit on your blouse, its going to feel pretty uncomfortable!
- If you have a long trip and a long lay-over, book into an airport hotel. We did this in Singapore and it gave us time to shower and lay down for a while! Baby M didn't sleep for that 6 hour period, but we could just relax and play with her lying down for a change (which certainly beats airport lounges hands down!).
- Prepare yourself for jetlag. Poor little ones don't know what's going on and from our experience, it takes about 5 days to recover and get on local time. Apparently it differs depending on what direction you travel around the globe...but i'm yet to properly test that one out!
- Don't stress if your baby does cry. The first time Baby M had a little teary I got all frazzled that everyone else would be glaring at me, but as I looked around I noticed they all had headsets on and so were none the wiser that there was anything less than paradise on their flight!
We ended up on 11 planes over the 4 weeks, and had only one bad flight out of all of them.
I wanted to share this little creation that I whipped up on our first flight and used whenever the flight was long enough to justify the bassinet being attached to the bulkhead. We found that whilst Baby M loved being in the bassinet, it was very distracting having the cabin lights coming on and off and people walking past peering in on their way to the bathroom! So, I had carried with me Micropore paper tape (as well as sticky-tape but the paper tape worked so much better) and a light-weight blanket to create a tent-like-structure over her bassinet to block out the distractions. It worked a treat!!
Blissfully asleep......but still holding on for dear life!!!
I think Madeleine was responsible for bassinet-envy from all other babies, and lets be real, all other economy-seated adults!
