We all took a long trip this week…about 17 hours worth of flying, a several-day layover in a hotel, a foreign country. I have read a few articles in the past year about techniques and products to help make traveling with babies and children convenient and bearable. Special sleeping spots, straps to attach carseats (with babies inside) to rolling carry-on luggage, baby neck pillows, herbal this and that. Little EC did a great job the entire way through, so I thought I’d share which of the advice I had read we tried.

• Nothing

We didn’t buy any special products. We didn’t feed her anything in particular. We didn’t do really anything special.

In the hotel, we played her the same sleep-time music that we normally do, and she fell asleep in the hotel crib just the same as she would have anywhere.

In the airplane, we made sure she was sucking on a pacifier during takeoff and landing, and she didn’t have any trouble with ears popping. She slept through most of the 17 hours’ worth of flight time. I changed two diapers on the bathroom changing tables, and two on the airplane seats. She ate just before getting on the plane, twice on the plane, and again right after getting off.

The only thing of note, at all, is that in each of our stops—the layover hotel, and our final destination—she slept really poorly the first night. Every half-hour to hour she was awake, fussing. There must be something about the new environment (or the time zone difference) that really threw her off. Also, she hit a growth spurt the day before we took off, and is now eating every 3 hours again, instead of 4…so that might have something to do with it. But by night 2, she was back to normal.

And one last thing of note…while you can take unlimited amounts of frozen mother’s milk onto an airplane, and it can be accompanied by up to five pounds of dry ice—which did great at keeping it all frozen, by the way—both TSA and the airline employees are vague on the rules. We were told multiple times that we couldn’t bring those things with us. After appealing to their own rules again and again, we always got through. But we also got to the airport hours early in anticipation of problems…so in the end, that is probably my one important piece of advice for anyone who might ask me. Leave lots of extra time. Air travel is bad enough as it is…do whatever it takes to eliminate stress.

EC decided last night that it was time to get rolling. She was lying on her back on the bed, and just all of a sudden threw her legs off to the side and got her knees on the bed. Her bottom arm was in a good position, and she waved her upper arm as if she was trying to get enough momentum to make it the rest of the way over. And there she stayed, stuck, unable to get the rest of the way over and unwilling to go back to her back to relax. 

I walked around behind her, encouraging her and putting myself into positions that would help her to get over if she looked at me. She was very proud of herself, but after about ten minutes was frustrated and ready to end the trial. So I reached over, took her upper hand and gently pulled her the rest of the way over. With any luck, that will promote the muscle memory needed for her to do it herself next time. 

Naturally, she was on the bed because I was changing her diaper. And naturally, the compulsion to flip came mid-change, before I’d put on a new one. And so my encouragement and help was amply rewarded by an enormous wet spot that leaked through all layers of the bed. 

And so I ended up washing the sheets late into the night, while EC went to bed ready to fight another day. 

I watched little EC do something interesting the other day. She was sitting in her swinging chair, kicking furiously as she likes to do. Then she would stop, open her mouth wide, and slowly move her fist to her mouth. Suck for a while. Put the fist down, and start kicking again. Then she’d repeat the process, very deliberately going through each step. She was practicing. She had learned that she could suck on her fist if she could get it to her mouth, and she had learned that a concentrated effort could get the fist to her mouth in a non-random way. And once she had figured it out, she kept doing it again, and again, and again.

Just about a week later, the fist goes into her mouth without even a thought…she had practiced enough for the process to be completely effortless. Her performance here conforms to my intuition about how this learning process works. First, having no idea what she’s doing, she flails about randomly, like when she was a newborn, biting her fist when she happened to get it to her mouth, and her mouth happened to be open. After the random flailings work a few times, she begins to catch on, and progresses to the deliberate practice stage. A few days of that, for these simple tasks, and she’s off to the races.

Now, she’s working on the rolling over part. She’s managed to roll over front-to-back a few times, in more or less random fashion…she can’t duplicate it on command. But I can watch her getting most of the way when she tries, and she’s clearly figured out the first half of the maneuver. She doesn’t get there deliberately yet because her arm is always in the way—the hand is in the mouth, of course—but once that moment comes when she randomly puts her arm in the right place, and she makes it, the whole thing should make sense, and there will probably be no stopping her. I think we’re on the threshold there.

She’s doing the same thing with language. She’s making all sorts of interesting sounds. But whereas flipping or sucking a fist is a macroscopic maneuver—arms and legs in generally the right place will achieve generally the right results—language is such a vast combination of small muscle movements and tongue-ear coordination that it’s no wonder that it takes a long time for them to figure it out.

It seemed to me the other day, while I was out walking with her, that it is a good thing it takes so long for them to learn things. There could be real problems if they learn too fast. But more on that another time.