My friend O asked me abouthow we coped on the flight from Australia-London: for anyone also attempting this int he future, here’s how we went:
>Okay, flight. Bring snacks for N. She will probably not eat aeroplane food. I managed with a banana, an avocado, lots of rice crackers and other biscuits (she didn’t eat many of those) and a lot of grapes. S also ate a bit of bread roll and fruit from our meals, and a small amount of one of the aeroplane’s ‘post-weaning meal’. But whatever N’s favourite foods are, take them with you assuming she will not eat anything else. Snacks pass time and also soothe a cranky baby!
Other things: we had a few different new toys and books she had not seen before which had varying degrees of success – a plastic mobile phone from fisher price, a sticker book, some animal figurines, and we had our laptops and Muppets DVD, which was perfect when she really, really got hysterical. That happened a couple of times. We had a midnight flight, which I think was good in some ways. It took her a couple of hours to settle down, but eventually she was so tired, she fell asleep – but because she didn’t fit in the bassinette, she would ONLY sleep on C. N should fit in bassinette with any luck, so hopefully you’ll be able to get some sleep yourself.
The first 7 hour flight we prob got 2-3 hours sleep, the second leg, S slept a lot more – but it was bloody agonising – 13 hours. I was utterly delirious when we arrived. It took a good week-10 days to get S back into reasonable sleeping patterns. She was waking at 4am and up for the day for awhile there – probably as it is summer time and the suns is bright by then – but we were going at bed at 8.30pm…!
However, there was one upside, which is that S would need a nap at about 10.30am after her 4am wake ups, and so she started falling asleep in the stroller (we bought a crappy maclaren on eBay UK) – so that’s been great – she will fall asleep while we’re out and we don’t have to fit in around cot-sleeps during the day.
The main problem on the flight is boredom. You have to eke out the entertainment, dole out snacks sparingly, sing songs, use the in-seat entertainment remote controller as a distraction for as long as possible… The upside, as you might know, is the bonus leg room you get in the bassinette seating rows : )
