I find your site very informative. I am shifting to Sydney this Aug. with my child. She is 5.5 months old. We will be taking Singapore Airline from India and transit from Singapore. Do u suggest to take pram while check in? So it can be used in transit? Is it easy to get back the pram in Singapore?

Please advice.

Regards
Rema

Delighted that you love the blog stories – and pleased the info is useful.
Now car seats… that is a very good question. The short answer is yes you will need car seats ‘by law’ – not sure how vigilant the fining is but you are legally required to have them. The rules do vary from state to state but here’s the info for Western Australia – http://www.childcarrestraints.com.au/
this says that up to 4 years old children should be in a car seat and from 4-7 in a booster seat. If you are hiring a car then you are request these from the hire company, otherwise you will be able to buy them when you arrive.
It’s probably best to buy in Australia than take your own as they have different safety standards for ‘approving’ car seats.
You can download the guide to child restraints for Australia here for much more info -> http://infrastructure.gov.au/roads/safety/publications/2007/Child_restraints.aspx

Have a great trip… it will be fun (just pick an airline with very good in flight entertainment to keep the boys occupied!).

I am so glad you found the site so useful and reassuring – not sure I have ever reduced anyone else to tears tho – LOL – but good tears at least
Now the question of jet lag and small people (and big people for that matter).

Obviously everyone has their own theory on this, but having done quite a bit of long haul travelling my preferred option is to forget everything time zone wise while you are ‘in transit’ then ‘deal with it’ when you get there and try and get onto local time as quickly as possible. And that said I always go for the ’sleep as much as you can option’ while actually travelling!

Now of course that’s not always possible with smaller people but really just let them sleep if they want to, and then just be prepared for a few middle of the night buggy strolls or being wide awake at odd times for a couple of days (I can remember taking turns to wheel Alex around our Hong Kong hotel at gone midnight en route to NZ when she was 18 months to try and get her to drop off!).

The key thing is to take 2-3 days to ’shift’ your sleep and awake patterns to Australia time when you get there, which if it means sleeping the first morning then getting up at lunchtime then do that.

Hope that helps. The key thing is that the flight is something where you must feel free to abandon lots of rules! Just do whatever you want to to get you through it, eat & sleep whenever. You’ll probably be surprised how much your daughter (who has a fab name it goes without saying!) will sleep en route. Honestly…

Enjoy!

Although we’re flying to South Africa with our little girl who will be 5 1/2 months when we leave in Nov, there are definately adapatable tips for our flight which will be 11 or so hours from LHR.

The nappy packs are a brilliant idea – will defo do that as well ass being able to get supplies airside instead of having to test everything at security.

Thank u for the tips.

I just wanted to say how GLAD I am that I have just come across your website!!!! We are flying to Australia in December for 3 weeks with our daughter (Lucy!) who will be 19 months and I have been really dreading it, to the extent that even though we’re going to see my parents, who we see very rarely owing to them sailing around the world (!), it has been stopping me from looking forward to the holiday, and I’ve always wanted to go to Australia! Your advice has been so amazingly reassuring and made me feel as though I am not completely mad, as may people have been suggesting I am! Although we are English we actually live in New York at the moment so will be flying to LA, stopping over night in a hotel then flying the next night to Sydney, which is 14 hours. I have travelled from NY to London lots but that’s only 8 hours and a 5 hour time difference. So much as I would love to travel Singapore Airlines, we are travelling on Delta, which will be a 777 and we have bulkhead seats but I am not sure if they have bassinets big enough for Lucy. Therefore we’ve booked her a seat and we are taking our car seat and I am hoping that she sleeps for some of it. My main worry is how to manage sleep and meal times on the flight. Should I stay on, say LA time until we get there? That means she’d be asleep for the first half of the flight or so. I am really worried about the jet lag.We take off at 10 pm and land at 8 am, which will be 6 pm NY time!! So does the advice you give in terms of sleeping straight away then getting up at lunch time still apply? I am guessing it does and then I will try to keep her up until the evening. Sorry that is all a bit of a waffle but I really have been worrying about it and have been so reassured by your site (I actually felt slightly teary when I did!!) so I thought I’d see if you had any extra tips for our case.

Thanks so much – this has made all the difference to how much I am looking forward to going!