Flying with an Infant & Toddler

We traveled back to Memphis a couple weeks ago so that our families could meet Michael. It is about a 22 hour drive (without children) from Denver to Memphis, so duh, we flew ;) 

This was Michael's first flight and Lucy's 4th flight. I have to be honest and say that I was sooo anxious about flying with both kids. To say I was dreading it is an understatement. The reason for this is because we haven't exactly had great flight experiences with Lucy any of the times she has flown, and 9 times out of 10 when Lucy cries, Michael cries. Bad combo friends!

Michael was easy peasy for the flight. I wore him in my Solly Baby Wrap, nursed him on the ascent and no problems! I use this nursing cover which I LOVE! It covers me completely, and Michael can kick and squirm all he wants to without me worrying about being exposed. 

Now for Lucy...I can't blame her one bit for her dislike of sitting still on a plane for 2 hours, especially at this age. Kids need to be able to move right?! I really have contemplated letting her run the aisle because it would save my sanity and probably the sanity of several others. But, in the event that running the aisle is not a reality, we need a serious bag of tricks! 

Prior to Lucy's first flight, I read up on a bunch of tips & tricks for flying with a little one. There are so many great ideas out there, unfortunately nothing really worked for us those first few times. I don't know if Lucy just hit a sweet spot with age for this flight or what but we had major success this time so I thought I'd share what worked for us, and then maybe someone else will find it helpful too. 

Lucy has a few different games that she plays on the iPad so we brought that and we had Finding Nemo on there so she could watch that too.  She likes this app with Elmo teaching the ABC's and the KidsDoodle app where she can color. This has never worked for us on prior flights, but we lucked out this time. 

Snacks, snacks, and more snacks! We over packed when it came to snacks, but it kept my little one busy so we'll take it. We use these for snacks to avoid a mess. 

One of Lucy's big things right now is stickers. She can't quite take them off by herself yet but she loves for me to hand the stickers to her and she sticks them on all kinds of things (the dog, construction paper, herself). This is actually something great I use for when I am nursing Michael as well. So we packed a bunch of stickers with us which worked great! This girl could sit for probably 30-45 minutes doing just stickers. 

The last thing I'll mention was just out of silliness but ended up working pretty well for us was "pretending to go to sleep". I had Michael with me and Ben had Lucy on his lap and he would say to her "let's take a nap!" and she would lay her head down on Ben with her eyes closed pretending to sleep quietly for about 30 seconds. I know that doesn't sound like much but do this repeatedly for a little while and it adds up. We totally got lucky on this one, but ya do what ya gotta do, no matter how silly it seems. 

Nothing ground breaking here, but definitely did the trick for us, at least for this flight. Hey, 1 out of 4 ain't bad right? ;) 

Happy, happy, happy!!