At 5 weeks old, we had to take Edie with us to her uncle’s wedding. This meant a 1 hour plane ride to Wellington and then a 1 hour drive to Featherston. We started to plan early and with a bit of trepidation – we have travelled a lot and are pretty organised about packing well and minimising unnecessary luggage, but travelling with a baby was a completely new experience.
Organising the flights with Air New Zealand was easy. When I booked, Edie hadn’t been born and their form required an infant’s birth date to book her place on my lap. I booked the 2 adult seats and then called them to ask about what to do for Edie – we just had to call when she was born and advise the date. It’s recommended that when you travel with little babies you try and book when they would ordinarily sleep but…well… when they haven’t been born yet it’s a bit hard! (At 5 weeks she doesn’t have a set nap time yet either.)
Rental car-wise, I booked with Thrifty because of the AA Member discount (though didn’t book their car seat option because we would take our own). Usually we book a tiny zippy car but I went for a slightly larger zippy car this time knowing we’d have extra cargo.
As it got closer to the time (and we started to have a bit of an idea about what were the must have things for our daily routines with Edie) we started to compile a packing list. The main things I was worried about not remembering for us were our wedding outfits and our iPhone chargers.
Edie’s list was much longer: several changes of clothes, several swaddles, scratch mittens, hats, nappies, wipes, nappy cream, nappy bag, capsule, stroller, breast pump, bottles, sanitiser, etc. And were we also going to take her travel cot? I was undecided but we realised she could sleep in her stroller, removing one piece of luggage. It still ended up being one bag for her and one bag for both of us, plus the stroller and the capsule! Luckily Air NZ are great and let parents take a stroller and car seat/capsule as additional baggage without having to pay more – you just have to get help from someone when you are at the check in kiosks to override the payment requirement.
And how did Edie react to the two flights? Like a star. We had been given the advice that either feeding or giving her a dummy would help with equalising her ears – we had both a dummy and bottle on hand – but didn’t even really need them. Edie slept the whole way there and back!
Without going into detail about how the weather interrupted our plans and what happened (though we did make it to the wedding), there are a couple of things which could have been better.
I need to make sure before time that I know where the parent rooms are in the airport. Though they say change tables are available in all female toilets, the one in the most central female toilet was either in an occupied stall with no sign or not present when I went in there. (Not sure why only female toilets too. This is an Equal Opportunity Nappy Changing Family.)
Even if flying domestically, the prolonged stay in the very busy domestic terminal was pretty average. Could now be worth forking out for a Koru Club membership we think.
Also need to take Louise’s recommendation of creating a ongoing packing lists which then get updated when you get back home (you can also read some of L’s other tips on her blog). I know there were a few things I thought would have been useful the day after the trip but I already can’t quite remember what those were…
Overall, I hope this was just the first of many trips. We’ll see!