We just returned from a whirlwind of July travel with our 23-month-old daughter, including weekend trips to Lake Tahoe and Seattle as well as our “toddlermoon” to Hawaii (i.e. our last hoorah big trip before we need to start paying for airfare for our daughter).
During our travels, which included road trips, plane rides, navigating cities and trying to relax at the beach, I was once again reminded that traveling with a baby is much easier than traveling with a walking tot.
Luckily, I also learned a thing or two about traveling with toddlers, including five ways to make traveling with them a bit easier that I recently shared over at family travel planning site FamiliesGo! Today’s hint is these five tips for traveling with an active toddler.
My tips run the gamut from how to get at least some relaxation (and beach reading) in when you have a curious toddler, to how to make long drives and plane rides go a little more smoothly with a tot in tow. Read all of my “5 Tips for Traveling With an Active Toddler,” in the full FamiliesGo! post.
What tips for traveling with toddlers did I miss? Share your best tips below.
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I couldn’t agree more that toddler travel is more of a challenge than infant travel. The hardest age for us was right about 18 months. Would be curious to know how you did with a 23 month old lap child on the longer flights. I’ve now turned the corner with my 10 month old – he gets his own seat for flights of 3+ hours now. Can’t do squirmy toddler as a lap child, but I salute those who can!
On longer flights, here’s how we survive having a toddler lap baby – my husband and I have her sit in between us (arm rest up) for much of the flight, or if we get lucky (like we just did on a return flight), there’s a spare middle seat between my husband and me (oh, and we always book the middle and aisle seats to raise the odds of a free middle seat). Of course, these tactics may be hard if you’re traveling with more than one lap baby and have to sit separate from your spouse (I’ve heard that at least some airlines don’t allow two lap babies in the same row).
As someone traveling without a child (yet!), it makes all the difference in the world when I am seated next to someone with a baby or toddler when they acknowledge at the beginning of the flight that their kid might start screaming at some point, and apologize in advance. I think connecting on a personal level helps raise compassion and then you don’t mind so much;-)
I completely agree with you. For our daughter’s first flight, we actually handed out tootsie roll pops to everyone seated around with a little note saying “please excuse any crying. It’s my first flight.” Everyone on the flight loved my daughter after that:)