A question that I (Kali) am asked often is “How do you do it?” Sometimes this refers to homeschooling, sometimes it refers to bearing the heat of living near the equator, but lately it has referred to traveling with young kids to the other side of the world. So here’s my post about how it’s done.
As we’ve done this trip 6 times as a family, we have learned a few things.
Less is more. Our children are content to watch the movies that are on the plane or play on iPads when they aren’t sleeping on the flights. Only Laurel is an independent reader, so she will bring a chapter book. This trip’s book of choice was “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” If we bring anything else it creates arguments and clutter.
Don’t force sleeping or eating. When one travels for 40 hours, sleep is bound to happen. If the kiddos are happy watching a movie, we don’t force a nap because we think it’s time for a nap. Same goes with meals. My kids are rarely hungry for the meals when they come around on the flight. We let them eat what they like from it and leave it at that. Airplane food (as most of you know) is not great, and even less so to tired, picky eaters.
Lots of patience. Patience for everyone. It’s helpful for Matt and I to trade off parenting when one of us is over-stressed, the other can come in with more patience. (Usually this is me being overly stressed with high emotions while traveling and Matt being calm, cool and collected.) Traveling is hard, moving is hard, and our little ones don’t have the emotional maturity to handle it well all the time (sometimes neither do I). The more patience we can give them, the happy we all are.
Jet-lag is real. They say that it takes one day for every hour that you’re adjusting from to get over jet lag. That would be 13 days for us. Luckily, it usually takes us about a week to really get back on the right schedule. In that first week, sleeping happens at odd hours and odd places. Our first night back we went to bed by 5pm and woke up at 3am. Breakfast was made by 3:30am and we just got on with our day, like it was not the middle of the night. We don’t plan more than one major activity per day for the first week we are back, and it always happens in the morning. We just never know how we will feel after 3pm.
We love living here, but we don’t love the long flights it takes to get here. We are thankful that our kids are super travelers. They look forward to long flights, walking through airports and packing their own backpacks for the trips.
Above are pictures of the girls enjoying a 6 hour layover in the Singapore airport. (Not shown is the 1 hour nap we took at an empty gate).
This is a bassinet that they attach to the wall right in front of my seat. It’s a life saver traveling with an infant. While he is awake in this photo, he spent most of his time sleeping throughout the flights.