Hello hello! I think I mentioned in an earlier post that we had a trip to California planned — and that’s where we are right now. The girls and I flew out last Monday and KC will be joining us in a couple weeks once his busy season at work has ended.

The flight went ok. My parents were on the same flight but weren’t in the same row as us or anything, so while I did have some help, I did the bulk of the work myself. I would have said it was a very successful flight, but about an hour and a half before we landed Prim ended up throwing up, which kind of disrupted things a bit. (She’s been on some antibiotics that upset her stomach occasionally — poor thing.) Lark also had a giant meltdown as we were landing, but honestly, with babies this age it’s kind of to be expected on a flight that long. We had all been up since 6am Amsterdam time and by the time we were landing it was 9pm over there and Lark had slept a total of about 40 minutes broken into two naps on the flight, so she was just done.

One of the things I have learned after taking so many flights with kiddos is that some stuff you have to just let go of. I used to stress out about any noise my kids made and would be wracked with guilt if one of them was having a meltdown. Now I go into long flights knowing that the kids will make some noise and that they may have a meltdown at the very end after I have tried everything in my power to keep them quiet. Honestly, it’s par for the course and the people sitting nearby will survive. This is not to say that I don’t try to keep my kids quiet on the plane — I work my butt off to keep the kids calm and entertained (seriously, next time you’re annoyed that you’re on a flight with young children, know that their parents are way more stressed and worried about flying with them than you are. TRUST ME.) It’s more that I’ve come to accept the realities of flying with young children. Sometimes there’s noise, sometimes there’s a meltdown, and when you’re really unlucky, sometimes there’s puke.

Anyway, onto an amazing travel find! Lark is at the age that I think is most difficult to travel with. She’s mobile but not walking and doesn’t have good spacial awareness yet, so she wants to move around in her seat but doesn’t comprehend that leaning headfirst into the legroom area is a pretty bad idea. Also, if you’ve traveled with very young children you probably know about the special hell that is them dropping or throwing toys into the foot space and then having to contort yourself to try and retrieve them.

We had a seat for Lark on the plane, and while some parents opt to carry on a carseat for children this age, I knew that would never work for Lark. She is hardly ever in a carseat to begin with (we have no car in Amsterdam) and she absolutely hates being in the car in general anyway. If you’ve been reading the blog for awhile, you might remember that we brought the carseat on the plane when we moved to Amsterdam when Prim was almost exactly the same age Lark is now. After that flight I was firmly in the camp of NEVER bringing a carseat onboard. So if your kiddo loves the carseat — cool, more power to you. If they don’t love the carseat or you’re not positive it’s the best option for your little one — I’ve got something for you!

I came across this while trying to figure out a solution to the problem of flying with a crawler, but just couldn’t justify the price tag, even for 10 hours of sanity. I thought that there may be another cheaper option on Amazon and ended up doing a deep-dive into the world of inflatable footrests. They all have different dimensions, price tags and reviews, and so after literally drawing out the dimensions of like six different options, I ultimately landed on this one and purchased two — one for Lark and one for Prim. (I mean, look at that photo of Prim up there — all that wasted space where her feet are!)

I tested one of them out at our apartment first, inflating it myself, and it was doable — it took maybe a minute, taking it slow so that I wouldn’t pass out from all the deep breathing. However, I knew I would be packing Prim’s travel bed rail for our trip as well (we bring it everywhere with us — totally recommend!) which has a small hand pump, and so packed the pump in my carry-on (you can see it in the photo above — it’s that orange thing). This was such a smart move, as blowing both of these up at 35,000 feet would have been annoying, and because they fit so snugly in the foot space between the seats, it would be difficult to shove them into place after they were fully inflated. With the pump I was able to inflate them to about 90% and then put them into place and finish inflating them, so they fit tightly between the seats.

I covered the two seats and footrests with the airplane blankets we were given, which made things not only cozier, but much easier to clean up. If you’ve flown on a long flight with young kids you know that the seats often look like you’ve murdered a few sleeves of Saltines by the time you land, so I totally recommend the blanket trick. The blankets were also my saving grace when Prim threw up, because I just bundled up the blanket she was sitting on and handed it over to the flight attendant and ended up with a completely clean seat afterwards.

The footrests give the girls way more space to move around and even makes it so they could lay down if they wanted to (as though they would ever voluntarily go to sleep on a flight though — haha! Uggghhhh.)

If you’re going on a long-haul flight with a kiddo I can’t recommend this footrest enough. It folds up small so it’s not a hassle to pack it in a carry-on, and it inflates and deflates quickly. I stuffed a couple of the complimentary pillows into any open crevice next to the footrests so there was literally nowhere that toys could fall and get lost, which saved both my back and my sanity on the 10+ hour flight.

I’ll try to do another post about what I brought on the plane for traveling with the girls since I now feel like I’ve traveled enough to pack pretty strategically, and knowing what and how much to pack is one of the most daunting parts of traveling with kids, I think. (Because you can totally get into the headspace of thinking that you need bring anything and everything when you travel with kids — I totally get it.)

If you have any questions about traveling with kids in the meantime, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll respond as soon as I can!