Money Saving, Potty Training, & Room Sharing While Traveling with Kids
I would have to classify our first cross-country trip with both girls as a doozy.
Our East Coast saga spanned 10 days, 3 lodgings (with family on Long Island + a hotel in New York City + an Airbnb in Virginia) and 3 flights. In the end, as always, it was well worth all the lugging of the bags and the kids to visit family and friends. But after six nights of room sharing (all four of us in one bedroom!!!) and juggling two kids in some new-to-them places, I came home with *thoughts*.
Welcome to Carry On! I’m Amanda, mom of two (3y & 4m), VP of partnerships at a creator media brand, and writer navigating travel after kids.
Based in Southern California by way of New York, we have upcoming trips with the kids to the East Coast (yes, again four weeks after the trip in this post) and Spain (yes, again! more to come soon.)
Today: my top three somewhat random tips coming out of this recent trip.
1. Save $$ by using your car seat bag to check extra items.
Car seat bags are huge, however, technically, you are not supposed to put anything else inside because airlines let you check them for free. And I am a rule follower (mostly). But this strategy has worked for us 75% of the time.
Items we successfully checked for free alongside the car seats on this trip:
Slumberpod
Inflatable toddler bed
Toddler blanket and pillow
Lovies
Packs of diapers
Packs of wipes
A couple of times, we have even fit the entire Guava Lotus inside the car seat bag — though I would not recommend this as travel cribs are bulky and therefore harder to get past a gate agent. Ask me how I know.
If the gate agent notices some extra bulk in the bag, they usually say nothing or give a light slap on the wrist. Something like a passing “you are not supposed to check anything in there but the car seat” followed by sending the bag on its merry way.
If questioned on this trip, we were prepared to check the car seat by itself (no bag, still free) and pay to check the car seat bag stuffed with rest of the items.
But JetBlue, American, and Breeze Airways all let our car seat bags through, saving us about $120 by my calculations. We would have had to pay to check an additional bag on all three flights had we not utilized the car seat bags.
If you are risk averse, at least throw a few extra diapers in there for me.
2. Put a pull-up over undies for recently potty trained toddlers on the plane.
Our toddler is daytime potty trained, but, naturally, accidents happen.
Rather than revert to pull-ups entirely while flying, we waited until after boarding then slid a pull-up over the undies with a quick speech along the lines of “This is just in case. We still use the potty.”
It worked like a charm. Our toddler stayed dry on both five-hour flights and the pull-up helped protect from potential airplane accidents without undermining the work we’ve done to make undies the norm.
3. Room Sharing Survival Guide
On this trip we slept four to a room at both my father-in-law’s house on Long Island and at a shared Airbnb with my extended family in Virginia. Our simple objective was for the girls get the best night of sleep possible.
There were a few challenges:
Time Change: We kept the girls on Pacific Time (with our toddler sleeping from about 10:00 pm to 9:30 am ET), which let us stay out late as a family and allowed the adults to slip out of the room for quiet mornings. I love keeping them on PT, but note that on trips longer than a week the kids end up naturally adjusting to the new time zone towards the end.
Staggered Bedtimes: The three year old and four month old do not go to bed at the same time, so each parent handled one kid. My husband would put the toddler down in the shared bedroom with white noise. I would feed the baby outside the room, then transfer her to the Slumberpod inside the room, a must-have which provided visual separation between the girls.
Overnight Wakings: The toddler rarely wakes at night, and even though the four month old had become a pretty reliable 9:00 pm to 6:00 am-er at home, she can still be noisy overnight. We placed the baby monitor inside the Slumberpod so we could see and react to the baby’s night wakings quickly to avoid disturbing her sister. The truth is, on this trip we had to intervene and quiet the baby much sooner than we would at home (when everyone is in different rooms) for the sake of keeping the toddler asleep.
A regret: I should have brought two white noise machines and two monitors for the room sharing situation. The baby’s noises occasionally disturbed the toddler overnight, which could have been avoided with better white noise coverage. And when we weren’t in the room, we had to rely on the sound from the monitor inside the Slumberpod to tell us if the toddler was awake - not ideal.
Overall, room sharing was laborious for us parents. “Stressful” and “very hard to execute” in Joe’s words. And he’s right — it took a ton of work to get to the outcome where everyone got decent sleep. Sharing a room with small kids is one of those things that makes post-kid travel feel like a trip… not a vacation.
A caveat: The success of this room sharing experience, as with many travel related things, harkens back to what is the age of kids when traveling? At three years old, our elder daughter understood to be quiet in the room while her sister was sleeping, which would not have been the case a year ago.
Also, critically, our four month old sleeps “through the night”. I put this in quotes because parents of four month olds know that every night is different. But if the baby were younger on this trip, we might have been dealing with more overnight wake ups that could have been disruptive to the toddler, whose overnight sleep we try to protect since she doesn’t nap.
All of this and we are headed back to the East Coast with the girls in a few weeks. You better believe our car seat bags will be filled, a plane pull-up will be ready, and our Airbnb is booked — this time, one with separate bedrooms for us and the girls :)
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