Travelling with a Toddler

Although I now live in Kent and my husband is from Kent, I am originally from Scotland and my family still live there. This means that twice a year (usually) we have to get ourselves from a place that's almost in France to the right side of the border.  Pre-child that was usually easy enough, but now that the toddler has come along it takes a bit more planning.

We have a first generation iPad which has now been fully devoted to toddler apps which is a great travel aid. We have it loaded up with Peppa Pig apps, colouring-in apps, counting apps, letter apps and almost endless episodes of Chuggington. It's enough to keep him amused for a fair old time. Of course, not wanting to irritate all the other passengers, we have invested in some headphones to go with the aforementioned iPad. It took a bit of searching but we managed to find some children's sized headphones that are also sound limited, limiting how high the volume can go. This is great as it means we don't need to worry about him turning the volume up to ear-splitting levels!

Along-side these two essentials we also pack a backpack with reading books and colouring-in books, a new magazine with lots of stickers and a small Aquadoodle. I have to say that since I've been introduced to the world of "toddler toys" the Aquadoodle still holds the place in my heart reserved for the cleverest of inventions as it enables multi-coloured drawing with a pen containing nothing more than water. It makes it the dream toy to use while travelling.

We have chosen to fly this time as driving with a 3 year old didn't appeal and didn't have any advantage over flying as we can borrow a family member's car while we're North of the border and getting the train on a weekend is more frustrating than anything else. When flying, we always make sure we make ourselves known to the ground crew and ask for a pre-board. As we are flying scheduled flights, it makes boarding so much easier without having a hundred huffy business men and women standing behind us waiting for us to get all our clutter away.

Of course, planning a 2 week trip to Scotland involves a lot of reference numbers, packing lists and a lot of information in my holiday Filofax, which I'll be reviewing soon (with pictures, of course!)