WFMW-Traveling With Little Ones

As my husband and I are starting to plan our return trip to the US, we are using what we learned from our trip to Israel to guide our decisions. While most of you are probably not planning any international travel in the near future, I do have a couple tips that apply to domestic air travel too.

• If a direct flight will take more than a couple hours, find a route (or create one!) with at least one layover/plane change.

When we flew to Israel, we took two flights: Las Vegas to Newark, and Newark to Tel Aviv. Our son was almost 9 months old at the time, and he luckily slept through the first flight (five hours), but the second flight was a nightmare (ten hours). Not only was our son bored out of his skull, but diaper changes were a huge pain. And since I had a middle seat, I didn't get up much. By the time we touched down, my ankles were badly swollen, and didn't return to normal for a full day.

For our return trip, we're planning to have many plane changes. This way we can stretch our legs, have some real food, and use a real bathroom between flights. I'd especially recommend this to anyone who is pregnant (those lavatories are tight!) or whose little one is old enough to use the bathroom, but needs supervision while in there!.

• Don't leave it to the airlines to determine your flight schedule.

Play around with different flights on Travelocity or some other travel website. The layovers that come up in multi-flight routes are often too short to provide real respite for toddlers or meals for families. They can also cost more!

• Speaking of cost, look at flights that do not go through major hubs.

We found that, by avoiding both Heathrow and Charles du Gaul airports in scheduling flights back to the US, we could save $1500 off of what the most direct route would cost. Using smaller, less well-known airports really knocked a lot of money off the ticket price. It might not always hold true in domestic flights, but it's certainly worth looking!

Basically what we did, was look at flights going to hubs. Then we'd find the least expensive that made sense and do a new search from our starting point to wherever the layover for that flight was. That layover point became our new starting point and we'd start again. It took a little time, but the price difference really added up! And as a result, we will never have a flight of more than 4 hours.

Now for child-specific tips for during the flight!

• If your child is still pretty small (using a bottle or sippy cup), bottles that require liners are worth their weight in gold on an airplane! If you can, find such a bottle that you can get a soft sippy spout for (many bottle brands have sippy cup converters available). Here's an example, although I don't know if it would work with liners:

• Bring toys that lie flat and don't role. 'Nuff said.
• Buy some packs of individually packaged apple sauce. If they are nice in security, and the packages aren't open, they will let you through with them even though they are a little over the size limit for liquids. These are great snacks for little ones, especially if the airplane food is iffy (or nonexistent) or there isn't time to buy in the airport.

Okay. That's enough for now. For more Works for Me Wednesday tips, check out We Are THAT Family!