Traveling with baby

Traveling with children, especially infants can be very stressful, but with a little planning and a lot of luck, you can have a pleasant trip. We just got back from our first out of state trip with our 6 month old. I have to say it was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. All together we had five plane trips and many long car rides. Our son was great on the planes but not so good during to car rides. He is also teething right now so he did not do so well with sleeping away from home. At home he went from waking up once a night to four times a night. During vacation, he would not go to sleep with out a fight and then woke up every two hours after that. Needless to say, sleep was not something we got much of on our vacation.

To save money, we used an employee pass to go to Phoenix. My husband’s dad works for Alaska Airlines so we were able to do this. It only cost about 10% of the going rate for a ticket. The catch is that you are flying stand-by. I have flow stand-by before and my best advice is to get the first flight out or the last flight out. Those are going to give you the best chances of getting on right away. For our flight, we arrived two hours earlier of the last flight and got right on. There was a woman sitting near us that had been waiting all day to fly stand-by. She could have saved herself a lot of grief if she knew that it is not worth trying for middle of the day flights when you fly stand-by. The only exception to this is if you are an airline employee with a good deal of seniority.

We flew two different airlines to visit all of the family we wanted to see. One was Alaska and the other was Delta. I love Alaska. Very good service, free bags to go over the car seat and Jones soda on the plane. They let families with small children pre-board and don’t mind helping you with your child on the plane. Delta on the other hand was a pain. They charge $5 for a bag (a clear trash bag) to go over your car seat, don’t let families pre-board and are just rather rude over all. After flying with them four times, in four different planes with four different crews, I feel that I can say it was not just someone having a bad day. The worst part about Delta is that they do not let you keep your baby in a sling or carrier when taking off and landing. You have to hold the baby in your arms. I fail to see much difference in the two but I will tell you that I have strict rules against waking sleeping babies. I also have been blessed with the only baby in the world that does not want to sleep in my arms but will sleep in the sling. I was lucky that those flights were not ones that my son wanted to sleep on. Now I know, just stick with the best. Alaska is normally cheaper anyways but we were flying in to a very small airport that Alaska did not fly to.