Welcome to the 2nd post in the “Traveling with Baby” series. Today, I am going over our flight and travel experiences from when our daughter was 8 months old and I believe these are good tips for any “active” baby. By this age, she wasn’t into sleeping as much as she was before 6 months but she also wasn’t walking all over the place as an older toddler would be.
This particular flight was from the Portland Airport in Oregon to Las Vegas, around a 2 hour flight. This time, I had to be a little more prepared to keep her distracted on the flight since she wouldn’t be sleeping the whole time! If you are looking for specific packing tips, you will find them here.
First off, getting to the airport and through security was our first priority. This trip was the first we didn’t take our car seat with us since my mom had purchased one before our visit!! Yeah for visiting family! If you need to bring a car seat, I recommend this carrier. It has straps to wear as a backpack and is just padded enough to keep your car seat safe throughout the adventures of checked luggage. We have checked it for multiple flights and our car seat has made it through with no issues each time. You can usually gate check a car seat if you need to but my husband usually checks his golf clubs on trips to Vegas so we figure it’s easier to check the car seat while we are there.
We also use a front pack like this one to carry our daughter throughout our trip. I LOVE wearing her and having both hands free to take my own shoes off, grab our luggage, and all the other things I need my hands free for. Also, you don’t have to take baby out of the front pack to go through security, which is a total time saver. If you prefer to take a stroller with you, this is our go-to travel stroller and it can fit under most airplane seats as a carry on. If you don’t carry it on, you are allowed to check it at the gate and it doesn’t count as an additional carry on.
Prior to boarding, we change her diaper one last time and both of us go to the restroom. It is much easier to do all these things on the ground instead of on the cramped airplane. For boarding, families are allowed priority boarding if you need more time to get settled. This trip, we decided not to board early since our daughter was a little more active and it gave her time to continue to look around at all the new experiences. This will be dependent on your individual child and if you think they can handle sitting in the seat for a little longer or if you have luggage you want to make sure you get overhead bin space for. Our flight was not fully booked, due to COVID, so we also thought it was fine to wait for that reason.
One thing I would like to mention as well, regarding seats, we chose to have our daughter on our lap this trip since the plane was a 2 seater and we didn’t want to split up our family. The flight home was a 3 seater but we still had her in our lap since this was during a time that Alaska was not filling middle seats due to COVID, we basically had a free seat for her. She still sat in our laps for take off and landing but we were able to lay her down for her nap on the extra seat between us.
The difference of this flight from our previous flight, when she was 5 months old, is that she didn’t nap the whole time. It was still a pretty short flight but I made sure to have plenty of distractions for her. Our diaper bag was filled with toys and snacks and only a few diapers in case of a blow out. I also used non-toys to keep her occupied. The empty plastic water bottle and cup the flight attendants passed out was a life saver, even the napkin given with the snack was entertaining for her. As long as you don’t mind picking up little napkin pieces for about 30 minutes, it was a great “toy”! She was also teething during our first flight so my husband did walk the aisle to the bathroom with her at one point, just to get her up and looking around. It made her calm down and she didn’t mind coming back to the seat after 2 trips down the aisle.
Our daughter doesn’t watch much TV at home and it isn’t usually much of a distraction for her but, I was able to get her to sit still and stare at Troll’s for about 20 minutes, see above! I didn’t worry about her listening to it at this point, I hadn’t bought headphones for her yet, the colors and animation were enough to keep her entertained. As you can see in the above picture, she had PLENTY of distractions in front of her at all times!
That’s all I have for this trip, it was similar to our first flight with her, you can see that post here. Coming up, our biggest travel experience with her to date! Stay tuned…
Whole Health Momma 