Editor’s Note: Happy Monday. If you missed our morning post, OBE and Bitchin’ Kitchen have hooked up for a spooktacular giveaway. Check out the details and video HERE.

As we start to plan for the holiday season, traveling with our families enters into the picture. Before you run screaming from the thought of taking a long trip together, check out Alix Wilson’s piece on family airplane travel packed with tips for traveling with kids. In the end, it’s all about organizing and planning for chaos – after that it’s time to create some great memories. Here she is:

I have always loved traveling. There’s something about jumping on a plane and being deposited, hours later, in a totally different environment – exciting adventures awaiting – that appeals to me. However, traveling as a parent has taught me a few lessons in planning that my fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants experiences hadn’t.

After cutting my teeth on five trips flying solo with the kids, it didn’t seem overly daunting to get through our end-of-Summer Eastern adventure this year with nary a hitch. Just the first day alone, though, would be our longest trip to date with over 12 hours of travel when all was said and done.

Gasp. This was going to take some serious planning.

If you’re anything like me, a huge trip like this begins weeks before the actual event. My mind reels in to-do list mode – thinking of things I don’t want to forget, things that need to be done before departing and getting the kids prepared for the journey.

I learned, not so long ago, that the way to avoid being kept up all night with mental checklists was to always have a notepad by the bed and it made this trip easier than my reeling mind did. I got the boys prepared by finding library books about where we were going, psyching them up about all the cool things we would do and by repeatedly talking about how long the airplane flight would be.

I figured if they were expecting a never ending flight, then a mere 5 hours would be a cinch!

My real preparations began a couple of days before departure. Figuring out what we wouldn’t take and taking care of basics was the first step.

Here are my recommendations:

1. Set out your kids clothes for the few days BEFORE you travel. Then do the laundry and pack, knowing you don’t have to worry about the clothes currently on their body being clean or packed.
2. Check in and pick you airline seats. It may seem simple. But, it clears one more thing from your head.
3. Print out your boarding passes. Kids hate to wait. With boarding passes in hand, there’s less time in line. If you have a mobile device with internet capabilities, you can save paper by having your boarding passes sent to you electronically and not printing them out at all.
4. Check the long-term weather forecast. We would be gone for just over two weeks, and after a quick look at the long range forecast it was apparent that we would need to bring, well, everything. There was going to be beach weather, cold cloudy days, and our hosts in Quebec specifically said we should pack rubber boots!

So upstairs I went. My process of packing pretty much involves sitting in front of every article of clothing we own and going from there. Person by person I set aside all of the clothes, jackets, hats and footwear that I wanted to bring along.

Tips for packing:

1. Make piles for each person
2. Pack one large bag with everyday clothes.  That way while we were living out of a suitcase, I would be able to open it up and have everything neatly laid out in front of me. In the outer pocket I packed the bedtime stories.
3. Pack a duffel bag with outdoor gear like shoes and jackets.
4. Pack a backpack for the things that you’d want to have with you most of the time – toiletries, towels, swimwear, a large cloth bag for dirty laundry, portable DVD player and movies (for the road trip portion of our excursion), CDs and gifts for our hosts (homemade west coast blackberry jam of course). I put all the toiletries (including a hand towel) into their own bag and made sure it was packed on top so I could just grab the whole bag and head to the bathroom wherever we were.
5. Plan space for souvenirs.
6. Don’t forget boosters and car seats.
7. Consider taking a stroller. If you are travelling with an under two, having a carrier of some kind is a real lifesaver, whether it be a sling or a stroller. You can use the stroller in the airport right up to boarding the plane, and then the crew will stow it with the rest of the baggage. When you have landed it will be waiting right outside the plane.

Phew – time for a little break, then right on to the carry-on bag – quite possibly the most important piece of luggage! I decided on a multi-pocketed backpack to keep things really organized, and so that I would have both hands free at the airport (I packed my purse in the duffel bag).

Recommendations for packing the carry-on bag:

1. Put all of the important documents – boarding passes, passports, wallet, etc. - in one pocket
2. The next pocket held chewing gum, Goodypops (my youngest is too young for gum, and I don’t feel too badly about giving him these) and snacks for enjoyment during the flight.
3. The next pocket housed two zippered sandwich bags. One with a damp face cloth for sticky fingers, and the other full of Mr. Clean disinfectant wipes. I bought this product specifically for this trip, and packed the other half of the package in the large backpack that we would check in. I am not, by any means, a germaphobe. Generally speaking I feel that a certain amount of exposure to the natural mystery goo of the world is a good thing, however, the recycled air and short turnaround time between flights makes me uneasy. In fact, after every single flight that the boys and I had been on, at least one of us came down with some sort of bug (both ways). With all the H1N1 alertness around I decided to potentially look neurotic in the hopes of warding off sickness this time around.
4. The third pocket is where I put the smaller activities, as well as the headphones. I was lucky to have some old school headphones from an old walkman, which the boys found much more comfortable than the type that you have to stick into your ear (which was available for sale on our flight).
5. The fourth pocket was the largest and where I kept the larger activities as well as all my important paperwork. Here I had our return flight info, my car rental agreement, driving instructions for all the legs of our trip (four in total) and phone numbers of all our hosts.

Having a smooth flight really depends on activities to keep kids occupied and interested for long periods of time. A lot of planes (but not all) have a built-in TV for each seat. We aren’t big TV watchers at home, and I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of the boys having 5 hours of screen time, so I had to have things that would be able to compete with the TV’s supposed cool factor.

If it was up to my eldest, he would watch for the majority of the time. At 2 1/2, my youngest is not so captivated by the TV, and I knew keeping him busy would be more challenging. Because novelty can win some longer attention spans, I bought two surprise activities, one for each boy.

This trip I surprised W with travel Guess Who? which wooed him away from the screen for half of the flight. For V I got a wipe-off activity book, which we packed with whiteboard markers and erasers. V was too young to do the activities on his own, but I had plenty of time to work with him on it while W was engrossed in the in-flight movie. He almost seemed more content to colour and erase by himself anyway.

Both surprises were BIG hits! They had tons of fun with them on the flight, as well as throughout our trip.

Here are my recommendations for in-flight activities:

1. Organize activities in resealable freezer bags. Having the large activities organized in big freezer bags allowed me to move smoothly from one activity to another, not to mention they prevented the markers from rolling off of the fold down tray. If you’ve ever tried to get on your hands and knees to find something on an airplane, you’ll know the value of keeping things off of the floor!
2. Put everything you need for an activity in one bag. I put all of the erasable markers, erasers and wipe-off books in one, the Crayola Colour Wonder books and markers in another and the regular markers, colouring books and blank notepads in a third.
3. Know where your smaller activities are and make them easy to get to. In our small activites pocket were our BC Wildlife Go Fish cards, a deck of regular playing cards (for playing War with W), a few of our favourite Usborne seek and find books, as well as story books (which were not at all successful due to the noise level on the plane. I felt like I was doing story time for the whole section around us…).
4. Let kids have their own stash of fun. Each boy also had their own little backpack that they had personally packed with toys, but they didn’t use them during the flight at all, and when we returned I packed them in our checked luggage.  We did need the toys during our trip, just not on the flights.

With all of this ready to go, I felt like the chances of our travel day going smoothly were pretty good. The next day we left the house at 9 am and drove to the Victoria airport for noon. We checked our bags immediately and enjoyed a quick bite to eat with dad before saying our goodbyes and heading through security.

Our flight started boarding shortly thereafter (we wait until most people have boarded before getting on).

Tips for things to remember once you are travelling:

1. Keep your area clean to avoid getting sick later. The first thing I did on board was pull out the disinfectant wipes and wipe down our entire seating area – seats, armrests, trays, window shade and wall too. I may have looked like a freak, but we didn’t get sick on this trip!
2. Make plans for getting rid of pent-up energy. We arrived in Toronto at 8:30 p.m. their time. Our flight to Montreal didn’t depart until 10:30 p.m., so we had dinner and had fun on the “people movers” to get some exercise and smile a bit.
3. Be flexible and understand kids moods. After we boarded our second flight, it was held back for an hour due to “technical difficulties”. Our one hour flight doubled and we didn’t arrive in Montreal until 12:45 a.m. V had fallen asleep while the landed plane was getting to the gate, and W was in a supreme “past bedtime” mood.
4. Find yourself seriously grateful for your pre-packing regime. I wondered how I was going to retrieve our big pieces of luggage from the conveyor belt while holding thirty pounds of boy, but luckily the first thing off was one of the car seats, so I was able to set him down in it while I got the other pieces onto a luggage cart.

Then we were off to find the rental car desk. We finally got to the reception desk at 1:15 a.m. only to find that the clerk had left five minutes earlier!

Yikes!

We retraced our steps back to the arrivals area of the airport and waited in line for a taxi. By the time we were inside of our friends’ childfree flat downtown it was 3 a.m.! It was in this moment that I truly appreciated the packing job I had spent so much time on at home.

Being able to find the special blankets, PJ’s and toothbrushes quickly made bedtime go smoothly.

In reality I am blessed with two good listeners who travel very easily. They surprise me again and again at what they can withstand, and by how helpful they are when situations get tricky.

By preparing for worst case scenarios, trying to enjoy the trip as an experience in itself, and keeping in mind that you’ll get there eventually, you’ll find yourself much more laid back while traveling.  After all, it’s all about the destination!