What does your kid do at 6AM? Mine has been walking into my room and yelling “ARE WE GOING TO PARIS TODAY!?”
And then when I say not today, she lets out a big sigh and then asks when is the Easter Bunny coming back because she’s out of candy.
Her excitement is contagious, but I worry about one thing: the 12-hour plane ride.
(Why did they have to build that Paris so far away…)
Our previous long airplane ride of 13 hours when my daughter was nearly 2 didn’t go well at all. We made the unintelligent decision of giving her Benadryl on that flight which had exactly the opposite effect we wanted. It made her irritable, extremely cranky, and borderline hyper for about 4 hours.
When we later told our pediatrician about the strange outcome of the miracle drug, we found out that giving a child Benadryl to make them sleep is a myth completely made up by people that don’t have kids but love giving out parenting advice because they watch a lot of TV and have cats.
Well, not really. I made the cat’s thing up. But wouldn’t be surprised if they did own them.
Some tips I’ve gathered so far on flying with kids:
- If they understand what money is, bribing works.
- Take new toys that they haven’t seen before. But make sure the toys don’t talk or make noise – especially if they have Dora or her live-in boyfriend San Diego.
- Bring a portable DVD player, or even better an iPhone with lots of movies and preschool apps.
- Take a redeye flight. But don’t tell them that it’s a redeye flight because they might think zombies are on the plane.
- Bring plenty of snacks, and use Souplantation packaging whenever possible.
- Create an Art kit – tape, crayons, stickers and activity books – all with Princesses feeding unicorns near a Christmas tree on them.
- Convince why cats are evil and why people should never own one. 12-hours should be more than enough time to have some affect.
- Talk about how great it is that there’s a KFC in Paris and that’s only a few blocks away from where we’re staying! (I swear I didn’t plan that- it just magically happened that way.)
- Introduce “Where’s Waldo” books on the plane. Make up other stuff to find that isn’t there.
- Bring a Nintendo DSi – not for her, but to keep me occupied.
So tell me -- what tricks do you do when taking your kids on long trips?