Preparation

As I have mentioned before, we are going to be traveling to Europe this summer with my parents and my sister.  The trip is just about a month away, which we can hardly believe! 

We are wildly excited about the time in Europe itself, and have some accompanying trepidation about the plane flights getting there and back.  On the way there, we are going to have a marathon of a day, flying from Portland to Salt Lake City to Paris to Barcelona.  On the way back, we fly direct from Paris to Seattle and then just have a short hop to get home to Portland.  

As is my way, I have turned to Dr. Google for reassurance and found stories of people successfully traveling internationally with three young children.  In my searching around, I've also found a number of specific tips for being on the plane for a long time with young ones.  As well, we have some friends who recently moved to Germany with their little one and passed on some good advice on flying. 

Among things I wouldn't have thought of: 

• bring a change of clothes for everyone (as you never know when a child might puke on one of you or themselves), 
• bring magnetic board games, 
• don't pack too many activities,
• bring stickers, 
• bring lots of the thin children's books that you can find on the rotating racks at any bookstore (Mateo is particularly into the superhero genre at the moment), 
• bring a lot of food, and 
• definitely bring that iPad or DVD player. 

We're just hoping that our kids will sleep for quite a bit of the long flight on the way there, which will be largely at night.  Particularly, we hope that they will all sleep for at last some of it, so that we can snooze a little, too.  Other than that, we're crossing our fingers that the batteries on our iPad will last for a long, long time, and that the older kids will be relatively low maintenance for much of the time.  Rosie is the wild card, but hopefully we'll be able to switch off with her, and hopefully she will sleep.  The trip back is going to be all during the daytime, so we'll need to do a lot of planning for that one. 

Can you tell that I am all about planning for this?  I think a little work now will probably really pay off when we are on the plane.  And, I thought it would be good to post about this now so that we can look back later and laugh (or cry) about how it really went on the planes. 

Luckily, once we get there, we'll be with my parents and the adults will outnumber the kids, so hopefully we'll all be able to regroup.  Then, we'll have two weeks to explore and make memories in two amazing cities and one country inn in the middle.  I'm sure we will come back with some great stories!