Traveling with an Older Infant

So your newborn was a perfect flier. They slept most of the flight and would briefly wake up to eat and then would snuggle back to sleep. Everything was blissful. Now you have an infant that likes to crawl, move around, and has to be entertained. With a multi-hour flight on the horizon, you’re starting to stress. Don’t worry, you’ve got this!

With an active infant, flights and preparation are a little bit different than they used to be. Thankfully you can still prepare and hope that it is still smooth sailing (doh, flying!).

I still recommend checking the carseat and stroller at the ticketing counter with your suitcase. Your squirrelly child will require even more hands-on attention, so you’ll want your hands as free as possible. I still carried Kent through the airport (at least through security) in his baby carrier. TSA lets you walk through security with a baby strapped to you, and that allows you to get any liquids or electronics out of your bag without losing track of your infant (or having to do it one armed). However, I really recommend at least one adult get TSA Pre-check when traveling with kids. With TSA Pre-check I didn’t even have to empty out my diaper bag for liquids, bottled water, electronics, etc. or have to take off my shoes. You try to take off and put on shoes while holding an infant in your arms or baby carrier. It’s near impossible! Another note that I’ve made several times is that you are allowed to take formula and an unopened bottle of water through security with infants. This is a game changer in so many ways. First, you can grab the bottle of water a few days before at Safeway for $1, compared to the typical airport price of $5. When flying, especially in these times, sometimes stores aren’t open and if you were betting on buying water at the airport, you might be SOL. Just make sure that you let TSA know it’s for an infant and it shouldn’t be an issue.

Now that your infant is older, they probably aren’t just drinking milk. They need more substantial food to tide their tummies over on this adventure. We typically feed Kent whatever we are eating, but on airplanes that just means a packet of pretzels. No matter how small their bellies are, that won’t even hold them over. We also know that Kent gets the crankiest when he’s hungry, so we wanted to avoid that scenario if all possible. I loaded up on practically every snack in the baby food aisle! We even had to bring a second backpack for all the extra snacks. We wanted a handful of snacks mostly to keep him entertained on the plane. I know, there are better ways to entertain, but sometimes you need a few snacks to do the job. We love the puffs and yogurt bites, and so does Kent. We also tried the Gerber cheese puffs and now Kent tries to get them any chance possible. We additionally knew that he would need something more substantial than snacks, but since we’re weaning him off formula, didn’t want him on a liquid diet the entire day. Enter the magic squeeze pouches of baby food! We brought several on the flight and Kent loved sucking them down and they kept his belly nice and full! We ended up going on a long car drive one of the days and these came in handy there as well.

Don’t forget that even though they are older, they still probably need help popping their ears on the ascend and descend. Kent loves water so we were able to put some water in his bottle and he drank it the entire way up and down.

I think the most difficult part of traveling with an older infant is that they need to move around and be entertained. No more filling baby with some milk and having them sleep the entire flight. The best way we tried to prepare for this aspect was to break the flight down into 30-minute segments mentally and try to find items that would hold his attention for a 30-minute segment. We tried to grab a few of Kent’s favorite toys that were small enough to pack into the diaper bag. We knew we could get 30 minutes of entertainment out of that. We also went to the store the day before and he got to pick out a new toy. That would give us another half hour or so. Lately he has loved playing with sticky notes and putting them on surfaces and pulling them off, so we brought a packet of those as well. At home Kent is not allowed to play with electronics. We don’t have games on our phones or iPad for Kent to play with, he gets extremely limited screen time, and we don’t even let him hold or play with our phones. Traveling is a different beast. I’ve once heard it described as “Survival Mode” and I’d have to say that I agree with that statement. Whatever you can do to keep the kids entertained and not throwing a fit, I’ll do it! For this flight we downloaded a few episodes of The Office, Kent’s favorite show, and some baby games on the iPad in hopes to add an additional one or two 30-minute distracted segments. I believe we got about 30 minutes out of the iPad as Kent was busy touching the screen and completely rearranging everything on the home screen. The last activity that saved us was people watching! Kent is super social, so anytime someone walked by or was in line to go to the bathroom near us, he would become a complete ham. That seemed to be the biggest distraction, so I prayed that everyone on the plane at one point or another would get up for the bathroom. Hey, it may be weird, but it’s survival mode!

Layovers can be a blessing or a curse with infants. If you aren’t having to sprint to the other side of O’Hare with 12 minutes till your next flight takes off, it can give you a chance to change diapers in a real bathroom and get them to stretch their legs. One thing I never noticed until traveling with Kent was that many airports have either family bathrooms or nursery rooms. These are the holy grail! The nursery room has a nice and large changing area, a sink next it, and several chairs in case you need to feed baby as well (quite a few airports also have breastfeeding pods which are also amazing). Brad and I would go in the nursery room together and tag team changing Kent, getting him redressed, and everyone situated. If you’ve changed your kid on one of the changing tables in the women’s restroom and feel flustered at lack of room and crowdedness, you will be obsessed with the nursery room. Plus 4 hands are better than 2. The best part of a decent layover is for your infant to crawl or walk around. Sure, it’s a little gross crawling around on the floor, but we kept a close eye on Kent and cleaned off his hands really well after he was done. He is at the age where he needs to crawl around and get his energy out. We found an empty gate area and let him go wild. He was having so much fun crawling up to the windows and seeing the big planes and then rushing back over to us. This definitely helped him as he didn’t seem as antsy on the plane.

Traveling with an older infant is definitely different and harder than with a newborn. But, as long as you prepare, it is very manageable. If you know what makes your kid the fussiest, try to plan on ways to keep that aspect satisfied. Remember, you are in survival mode when traveling. Worse case scenario, you are probably never going to see the other passengers on that flight ever again 😉