After our first trip from London to Lisbon with our then 3-month-old baby I wrote this post mainly about the fears and the struggles of travelling with a small baby for the first time. Since then we’ve traveled a lot more back and forth not only with my firstborn but also with my secondborn, so there’s a lot more knowledge and experience on these trips now.
If you want practical trips on things that are helpful for the trip and toys that entertain kids on those trips, please check the following links and read them after reading this first experience. I hope this information is useful to you.
- The art of long drives with kids: my top tips
- Important documents when travelling through Europe: a checklist
- Best Toys for long drives with kids (this link sends you to other posts with specific suggestions from babies to 5-year-olds)
Before we travelled
One of the things that everyone tells you when you talk about having babies is “no more travelling!”. I’ve always challenged this assumption and thought (and said) “Why? It must be slightly more challenging, but some people do it”. “Oh, you have no idea”.
I would then kind of give up and wouldn’t challenge it too much as I didn’t have babies, so if this was true, I would only understand it once I had them.
And then I had a baby. As we are Portuguese we had to plan our first holidays to visit the family in Portugal, and that meant travelling.
So we planned our first trip to Portugal. By car. From London to Lisbon. With a 3 months old.
Our friends with babies said “You’re crazy! You have no idea what you’re getting into!”. And once again we thought “What’s the big deal?”. But we had never travelled with Dinis so if it was that hard, we would only understand it once we travelled. And so we did.
A car trip with a 3 months old
Our first and most difficult trip was on August 2018 when Dinis was 3 months old. Because we wanted to spend a month in Portugal and we have Mia (our black Labrador) we decided to drive, so she could come with us (I know #crazy).
Was it cheaper than flights and leaving Mia with a dogsitter? Not really. But it was more about having her with us for all that time to be honest. A month is a long time to leave her behind. Was it easy? Nop. Did we survive? Yes. Both on the way to Lisbon and back.
Driving to Portugal from London nonstop takes 21h26 min (according to Google Maps).
We had already done it when we went to Portugal to get married and we took two days (about 12h drive each day). But with Dinis we left London, drove down to France, through to Spain and arrived in Portugal 5 days later (one of the days was a stay-over at my brother’s in France). So a 4-day drive. Double the time we had done before. And why? Well, let me explain.
Challenges when travelling with a baby in a car
There’s a few challenges when travelling with a baby in a car.
First, you need to stop every two hours. Babies shouldn’t stay in the car seat for longer than that until they’re 6 months due to risks of suffocation. João planned a 6-hour drive per day, with a stop every two hours, so ideally, we would spend about 8 hours a day travelling to a new destination with minimum stops included.
But our drives took about 12 hours each day. And why? Because you should only stop every 2 hours for safety purposes, but a baby has a mind of their own. They’re hungry, they pee, they poop and most of all they get bored and cry about it. Especially when they’re not used to being in a car that often (which is our case, we don’t own a car in London).
So that’s the hardest bit, you need to stop often and irregularly. You also need to be patient and either have some things that help soothe your baby when annoyed or sleepy, teach your baby to self-soothe to sleep before you travel, during your travel or stop every single time your baby is upset or needs to sleep.
I’m not going to lie, he did get very upset a few times during our travels and at times when we couldn’t stop straight away (as we’d miss the exit for a resting area). But the truth is sometimes, the only things available are for you to comfort them, try to calm them down with other distractions and wait it out until you’re able to make the stop.
Feeding
With the next travels we did with him (by plane), one thing I’ve noticed is that breastfeeding is great for aeroplanes but not that great for cars. In a moving car, it’s not safe to take the baby out of the seat and hold them in the car. Should an accident happen (as we all know, these are unpredictable) the chances of survival drop drastically. So we avoid that at all costs.
For breastfeeding to work we need to feed the babies on demand. So sometimes they might sleep for 2 hours nonstop and have to be woken up, sometimes they feed every 30 min.
That’s when formula (or expressing if you’re good at it and have the patience for it) is a great help. You just need fresh boiled water in a flask, some prepared formula doses, and milk bottles and you’re good to go!
Nappy changes
This depends on the babies. Some babies are extremely sensitive to dirty nappies in the first months and will complain about it straight away. Dinis was like that and I understand! It must be just slightly uncomfortable to be sitting in your own pee or poop. Most rest stops will have toilets with changing tables for you to change your baby.
But when they don’t you quickly learn to improvise. I changed Dinis on grass, on a table and a lot of times on my lap whilst sitting in the car. It’s not very easy, and it depends on the size of your baby (I struggled more on the way back to London as he had grown during that month), but it’s doable.
Nap times
Naps are bliss. When they happen. I’m so glad I decided to try and fix Dinis’ sleep before we travelled. It wasn’t an easy task, some kids don’t need it, but I felt mine did and it helped us a lot. In case you’re interested, I will write another post on this topic and my notes from having 2 kids with very different sleeping patterns and with whom I took very different approaches when it comes to sleep and got fairly similar results.
In our case, teaching him to sleep with no “boob aid” helped us a lot during our trip. Not that I didn’t breastfeed him to sleep a few times should our stops allow it. But at least half the time he would go to sleep on his own whilst we were on route with minimal fuss.
Something that helps him be comfortable in his car seat is a cooling pad by AeroMoov , his favourite plush toy/doudou and a Rainmaker was always a great helper to make him fall asleep (I swear by the magic of the rainmaker).
Another thing that I now know helps is that if they hate being in their car seat, it might be because the car seat you own might not be right for your baby. It wasn’t the case for my son, but it was the case for my daughter. It might not be an option to change car seats but it might help to try and make some adjustments to the one you own to see if it makes a difference.
Top tip for travelling with a baby
Should you have no time to read anything else past this (I know how motherhood works) my top tip for travelling with a baby is the following: Just go.
As with a lot of things in life, the thought of travelling with our baby is scarier and way more difficult than actually travelling with our baby. Because once you’re on route, it’s actually fine. So just grab your baby, and go. Well, prepare a little of course. But don’t let the thought of it stop you from going.
Because we’re two Portuguese living in London, if we want to see our family we need to travel. And since Dinis was born, we made 3 trips to Portugal and went to Prague on holidays. So that “impossible to travel once you have a baby” is nonsense to me. You’re a bit more limited money-wise, you need to plan a bit more, but otherwise, it’s all good. You just need to be a bit more flexible about your normal routine and not worry about how that will permanently affect your baby: it will not. Babies are sponges; they absorb what’s around them and will change quickly and more effectively than adults. They just go with the flow if the people they trust and love are with them.
Was this an easy trip? Not really. It’s pretty exhausting. But would we do this again? Yes, we would (and we did). If anything it made us feel brave and made us not fear any other trip we did with him.
So that’s it. Do it. You and your baby will be fine. And he might not remember much of it, but he will love it and you will have the best memories of it.
Hug,
Millia
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