Travelling with baby, part 1: Stuff

We recently traveled to Australia for 4 weeks when our baby daughter was 2 months old. I'm writing a series of posts in the hope that this will help others. The other parts can be found here: Part 0.

In this post I'm going to talk about the stuff we took along with. First off I'd recommend getting Travels with Baby because of the helpful advice, but most of all it helped to reassure us that we were not totally nuts. It's there where we read to take binder clips to help secure cloths to cover our baby from the sun.

This is the most used, most critical thing that we took - a portable change pad. We had a Skip Hop Pronto! changing station, but I don't think that it matters specifically which brand / model you have as long as 1) it stores diapers / nappies and wipes 2) you can reasonably unfold / fold it 1 handed while you hold a baby. This was worth it's weight in gold because we needed to change her on planes, trains, automobiles, boats, in parks, hotels, etc. You don't want a big diaper bag with you when you're squeezing into an airplane bathroom.

For the long flight I was glad that we had the Baby B'Air Flight Vest. It helped us feel like we could doze off and not put our baby at a risk of flying around the cabin if the plane bounced around.

For sleeping we had the KidCo PeaPod pop up tent. I was happy to have that and we even take it with us when visiting family for dinner so we can have a place to put our baby down for a nap. My only complaint is that (with ours) there is no way to secure a blanket under the child so they are not lying directly on the nylon (or whatever it is) part of the tent. We'd put a blanket under her, but with her moving around it would get pushed into a corner.

For moving around we had a baby carrier, which we didn't use as much as I thought that we'd use. We took our Graco Mosaic Stroller, but any light stroller would do. It might be better to have a stroller that could carry more or had bigger wheels, but we wanted something that if it got crushed / broken by the airport crew we could easily replace it. A key addition to this setup was our Jolly Jumper Weather Safe Stroller Cover which allowed us to go around without fear of sunburning our daughter. We used the binder clips on this to open up 1/2 to allow air in, but still keep the sun off.