On Traveling With a Toddler: Jet Lag, Flexibility, and Letting Go

We didn’t travel for the first year and a half of our son’s life. Not even a weekend away.

Part of it was the exhaustion, the fog, and a deep desire to protect the precious routines we’d worked so hard to build. And part of it was the logistics, packing the necessities, sound machines, allergy-friendly meals for our regimented little guy.

The idea of travel felt (not to be dramatic) impossible. Something that belonged to a past version of us. The pre-baby version who booked flights and packed light and didn’t overthink every detail. Sometime after our first year of parenthood my partner and I started to miss that version.

So, slowly, we started to build the muscle of traveling with a child. First local, then longer. And last summer, we truly ripped the bandaid off and booked our first flight: a 16 hour international flight (with connection) to Egypt!

What We Learned About Jet Lag with a Toddler

Jet lag with a toddler is exactly as hard as you think it’ll be. But once you accept that it will be hard and remember that you can do hard things, all of the fearful anticipation fades away.

There’s a strange comfort in accepting that sleep will be off, meltdowns will happen, and everything will feel a little upside down for a few days. The key, for us, was dropping the idea that we could "fix" it immediately. Instead, we let ourselves be topsy turvy. Our guy is up and ready to play at 3am? There we are on the floor beside him, lights glowing while he gets out his morning energy.

To help reorient our circadian rhythm, we tried to get outside in the light as soon as possible each day. We let naps happen when they happened. And we tried to keep familiar sleep routines like bathtime and books before bed, but didn’t cling to them (hello co-sleeping). One thought that helped me relinquish our hard-won sleep routine was remembering that our tiny person was probably feeling things he couldnt comprehend so comforting him through this tough transition had to be top priority.

Flexibility Over Perfection

The biggest gift we gave ourselves was permission to not do it perfectly. We all ate weirdly timed meals for a while. Our itineraries were much lighter than pre-baby. But the benefit was a slower vacation focused on family and one another.

And somehow that made the sleep deprivation and ineveitable relearning the routine back home completely worth it.

Travelling with a toddler is in part preparing for every scenario, paking ample snacks, and having loads of entertainment. But more than anything else it is about having a flexible and resilient mindset. Our first big trip taught us so much about ourselves as individuals and a team, about our capacity, about how we want to shape our memories as a family.

What Helped Us Manage Jet Lag With a Toddler

We knew jet lag would be part of the package, so we tried to meet it with as much grace as possible. I won’t sugarcoat it, our jetlag sucked and I do not recommened flipping your sleep schedule a full 12 hours with kids but if you must here are some tips:

✧ Real Tips That Made a Difference ✧

1. Shift the schedule slowly
   A few days before the flight, we nudged bedtime and wake-up times closer to our destination’s timezone. Even small changes helped set the stage.

2. Get outside as soon as possible
   Natural light really does help. If the sun was up our son was outside, even when we were all running on fumes.

3. Don’t stress about perfect sleep
   Our sleep was upside down for a couple of days. We have never napped more on a vacation and at odd hours, but honestly the naps saved us.

4. Keep familiar routines
   A bath before bed, favorite bedtime story, same sleep sack. Even if the timing was off, the rhythm helped cue that it was time to sleep and injected a bit of normalcy into our eventings.

5. Have safe, familiar foods ready
   I’ve been talking a lot about sleep because that’s what we struggled with most but food was another issue for our guy. With food allergies in the mix, we packed enough “safe” snacks for the whole trip just in case he refused food we prepared there. It made things so much easier for us to not have to stress about him not sleeping or eating enough.

6. Limit long, late naps
   We let him nap when he needed to but capped anything too long or too late so we had a shot at a decent bedtime. To be honest, he really didn’t want to nap at first because he was so excited by the new environment but eventually got into a rhythm again.

7. Go easy on yourself
   Nothing about toddler jet lag is smooth and that’s to be expected. We kept our expectations low, held the moments lightly, and let our bodies adjust with time.

All In All

If you’re in that season of “we haven’t even tried yet,” I get it. But when you’re ready know that it doesn’t have to look perfect to be good. The jet lag will pass and the memories, even the hard ones, tend to stick around in the most beautiful way.