Come Fly With Me...

Flying with a young child is.... easy, difficult, scary, exciting, stressful, inspiring?

No matter which adjective you attach to this sentence, the first time flying with a young child can be daunting for any new parent. It was for me, but the reality was very very different from what I had anticipated and is now as much a part of the adventure as the destination we are heading off to.

Bristol Airport

First Things First

To travel internationally you need a passport and this goes for children too, no matter how young. It's pretty easy to apply for a child's first passport through www.gov.uk, costs around £50 and takes about 3 weeks to arrive on your door step.

One of the requirements is either a printed or digital photograph. This is probably the trickiest part of the whole application process as the rules on the type/composition/quality of the photograph are endless; "your photo cannot contain any other objects or people, it must be taken against a plain light-coloured background, it must include your head, shoulders and upper body, you must be facing forwards, looking straight at the camera with a plain expression, mouth closed, eyes open. Children must be on their own, but you can support your babies head so long as your hand isn't visible (but I can't be in the picture??? Not sure how that one works either...). Babies must not be holding toys or using dummies" . . . queue passport photo of Orla screaming for the next 5 years!

How on earth was I going to achieve this with a 6 month old baby? I erred on the side of caution and headed to a local branch of Snappy Snaps (after all they are the experts!). What I hadn't anticipated was to be charged £10!! Yes £10 for Orla to sit in a bouncy chair covered in an old white sheet for all of 30 seconds before being sent on our merry way (it took me longer to extract my debit card from my purse than for the photograph to be taken). Now I wasn't expecting a full on photo shoot but come on! The whole 30 seconds left me feeling very ripped off, but I suppose £10 is the price you pay for reassurance that your babies passport application won't be rejected.

Baby Paraphernalia

Something I hadn't considered was how our packing and/or luggage allowance was going to change with a baby. Long gone are the days of Geoff and I sharing a suitcase mainly consisting of swimwear and good books.

At 8 months we took our inaugural flight with Orla to Kefalonia for our first international family holiday. I had a very brief (and I mean very brief) moment where I wished I had persevered with the agony of breast-feeding so that I didn't have to pack bottles and formula and sterilising tablets, as well as all our weaning essentials (I suppose I could have timed the holiday for when she was feeding one way or the other - not both)! I'm sure there must have been a much lighter and efficient way to pack but not knowing the locality of where we were staying and what facilities were close by we opted to take all we needed in case we weren't able to source it locally. Hind sight is a wonderful thing as we could have saved ourselves a lot of space and money had we known there was a supermarket 20 mins from the villa.

Do consider what you need to pack if flying with a low cost airline where you pay for hold luggage separately. I completely underestimated how much we would be taking and we ended up paying an extra £60 per flight for going over our booked allowance by 5kgs.

Most airlines are pretty good when it comes to travelling with young children and allow you 1 or 2 extra pieces of baby luggage for free, i.e. pushchair, car seat, travel cot, etc, as well as a third piece of hand luggage for the baby. We've always managed with Geoff stashing our carry-on items and I take all of Orla's stuff. We also take a cheapy pushchair that usually lives at my parents and we don't mind getting thrown about by baggage handlers (tip: buy a brightly coloured strap to keep it folded and recognisable). Most airlines will let you take a pushchair through security and leave it at the flight gate when boarding. This is brilliant for carting hand luggage and coats around the airport, as chances are your little one won't want to go in it and risk missing out on airport fun (tip: items such as pushchairs tend to come off a flight and be placed in a separate 'large' baggage area rather than on the baggage reclaim belt. They are usually always last off (despite being last on so you would think first off) and these areas are nearly always tucked away in some corner, leaving you thinking that your pushchair has been left behind).

Flight Times

Researching before our first flight with Orla, I came across lots of travel blogs advising flights that coincided or didn't clash with nap/meal times in order to maintain a normal routine for little flyers. In all honesty we haven't found timing of flights to either help or hinder when travelling with Orla. We ditch the routine and day or night the excitement of travel keeps Orla captivated. Peak time flights can also be twice as expensive as off peak flights. We save our money in this regard and go for the cheapest flight option and Orla laps up the excitement of travel no matter the time of day. We do try to keep to our normal meal times more to abate a hangry toddler than keeping a sense of routine. We do keep our routine of changing into day clothes/pj's wherever we maybe, but lets face it, getting into pj's on a plane is far more exciting than at home!

We are also lucky that Orla will sleep pretty much anywhere if she is really that tired and who doesn't love a sneaky toddler snuggle.

British Airways flight to Iceland

In Flight Entertainment

When it comes to flying with young children every parents worse nightmare is an overtired/hungry child locked in a small space with hundreds of judging strangers. We've all been there in pre-family days hoping to God that you haven't got seats in the vicinity of the screaming child boarding a 8+hr flight. It was with this in mind that I did a whole load of research into tips on avoiding this exact scenario. Deciding that buying a planes worth of passengers a gift bag with ear plugs, drink, sweets and a 'sweet note' from baby wasn't an option (yes one Mum has apparently done this!!), I filled Orla's bag with snacks, drinks, games, books, stickers, a few new toys and downloaded a whole load of her fav CBeebies shows to the iPad in preparation for 'operation distraction' during both our flights with her. I even had milk/dummies ready for take off/landing in case of discomfort from pressure changes, but Orla of course has been quite content to wonder up and down the aisle or 'chat' to the passengers around us. Now I would never presume that this is a president for all future flights but it always catches me by surprise that she can be so resilient with the upheaval of travel.

For our Iceland trip we bought a Trunki from Facebook marketplace (1/2 the price and reusing/recycling at its best). This was great as we were able to fill it full of toys and snacks specially for Orla and it doubled up as a ride-on toy both in the airport and where we were staying. Conveniently it fit underneath the passenger chair in front of me so no constant climbing in and out of seats to the overhead lockers annoying the poor traveller allocated the seat next to us.

Keflavik International Airport

Seat Allocation

On the subject of seats, from 0-2yrs children do not need their own seat when flying (so please don't pay for one) but can sit on a parents lap with a specially designed lap belt (literally a little seat belt that attaches to your own). There was no way that Orla was going to sit on my lap when there was so much to explore and look at both in and outside the plane. I held her standing on my lap so she could look out the window with the belt as tight as we could make it (probably breaking all the rules, but so long as the flight attendants didn't see, what they don't know won't hurt them). She loved watching the ground disappear beneath us and pointing out what we could see.

Families with children are also called to board flights first in order to get settled and this also allows the airline time to load all those extras such as pushchairs. This is both a bonus and a hinderance as normally we would wait until there wasn't such a crush of passengers to negotiate, giving Orla the space of the departure lounge for as long as possible. However getting her used to the aircraft, settled into our seats, watching the plane fill up around us has also proved to be successful.

Airport Security

I found that carrying Orla in our Ergo 360 through the airport was far easier than having her strapped into the pushchair especially when it came to passing through airport security. My hands were free, we could easily collapse the pushchair to go through the x-ray machine and Orla could see what was going on. The only tricky part came when I was stopped at security in Kefalonia having forgotten about a 50ml bottle of baby suncream in my hand luggage and a couple of baby food pouches. Now Im pretty sure I had the same in my hand luggage going through Bristol airport but they didn't bat an eyelid. Kefalonia however was a different matter. Kefalonia airpot being the size of a postage stamp, apparently their security team perform their jobs very thoroughly and demanded I unpack a jam packed changing bag to retrieve said items, one-handed with a tired and frustrated baby in arms (they weren't going to let me have the pushchair or Ergo back until I was deemed no longer a threat). Geoff at the time also being frisked for forgetting to remove his belt (it happens every flight!), I attempted to explain above the protests of an 8 month old, in non-existent Greek that I had simply forgotten about the liquids in my hand luggage.

Fast forward a year and the whole process was much easier with Orla fully weaned and able to walk through Heathrow and Keflavik International airport in Iceland.

So there you have it... when it comes to flying with a young child/children never forget that the travel is a part of the adventure and you will be amazed at their resilience and adaptability. Sure there might be a few mishaps, but it all adds to the adventure.

#Comeflywithme #Adventuremama #Toddleradventures