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.