Flying with Toddlers

The First Flight...

This is the day.  For the first time, our family got on the plane together.  The last time we planned a short plane trip didn’t quite work out as our little Niel got sick with Kawasaki.  This time, praise God, all is well, and we are returning to attend my brother’s wedding celebration.   I can remember my anxiousness for this trip a week ago.  How will we manage?  I can’t keep my kids to sit still during a one and a half hours of church service, let alone a seven hours daytime flight.

We have selected to fly Garuda direct flight from Melbourne to Jakarta.  That means no transiting time to worry about, we don’t have to worry about changing planes, taking our luggage out, and worry on how to get our 3 children moving together in the airport without strollers.  Purchased our tickets online through zuji.com.au, and everything was in order.

I have packed little containers of cheerios, sultanas, almonds, apple chips, and plain dry biscuits. I’ve got little boxes of UHT milk, little boxes of juice, bananas, and apples for snack.  I hope those will keep my younger two busy.  For my preschooler, I got sticker books, colouring and dot-to-dot activity book with coloured markers, and a couple of toy cars.  These should keep everybody busy, I thought.  But nothing beats a new toy. 

All my three boys were fully engrossed with the little inflight touch screen entertainment monitor and its joystick on a spring back cable.  Ethan and Niel enjoyed touching all the icons and waited to see what will happen.   Malakai was very impressed with the inflight toilet flush system.  He spends a lot of his time visiting the toilet and watch the device sprinkle a bit of water, and suddenly with a big whooshing sound, the valve in the bottom of the cistern flung open and sucked everything into it, and closes back. All is quiet again. All is dry. 

Our first plane trip together.  Not as scary as I imagined it to be.  No screaming drama of kids rolling on the aisle.  No plane food were thrown and smeared all over the seats.  We were ok.  Phew…!  Hope we are as lucky on the overnight flight home.