Jack Tame: Travelling with a baby... what could go wrong? - Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

Everyone says the best time to travel with a baby is before it can walk.

Makes sense, when you think about it. Most toddlers, once they’ve learnt to trot around the place, live for nothing more. All they want to do is walk. In fact, if you think about it, you really don’t want to get close to even blurring the line between rolling and crawling and waddling away. The moment your child is old enough and independently spirited enough to drag themselves around, you’re done for. There is no reasoning with an exhausted one-year-old on a packed 777. You can’t calmly explain that actually the pilot has just put on the fasten seatbelt sign. You can’t even vegetate them with a screen.

As the old advice goes, if you’re going to travel with a young one, you’re best to do it when they’re really young. Hold them tight and they’ll mistake turbulence for rocking. Chuck them on the boob or the bottle if their ears are popping. And hey, you’ll be at your destination in no time!

Or not. As someone who usually prides themselves on embracing new experiences, even I’ll concede that as our departure date approached, I felt an unmistakably growing sense of anxiety about our journey: 24 hours to Toronto with a four-month-old little boy and his eight-year-old brother. It all seemed so easy when we booked the tickets!

The stress really kicked in the moment the taxi arrived to take us to the airport. Having purchased a special travel carseat secondhand, it was a rude shock to discover that it didn’t really fit our cab like it fitted the cars in the instructional YouTube videos. Cue ten minutes of wrestling and cursing and a t-shirt neckline already drenched in sweat.

Timing an 8pm flight with a baby means being at the airport at 6pm, which means getting a cab at 5.15pm. Our boy is fine in a carseat so long as he’s moving. But when it’s the beginning of a long weekend and everyone is leaving Auckland at once, nobody’s moving. You’re lucky to get more than a couple of car lengths without coming to a standstill again. By the time we arrived the airport he’d already screamed his lungs out and my blood pressure was sitting somewhere between concerning and see-a-medical professional immediately. Just 23 hours to go.

I’ve travelled enough and been sat next or near enough babies to know a lot of the theory around flying with little ones, but the thing you only fully appreciate once you’re in charge is how precarious any moment of peace always seems.  They might be fast asleep in their mother’s arms as the plane taxis to the runway, but he’s never more than a little jolt away from potentially stirring and screaming. It’s like you’re cradling a pink, chubby little grenade who’s missing a pin. He might go off and it might be catastrophic. He might scream and scream until all the babies on the flight slowly tip off each other, like a cadre of car alarms at 30 thousand feet. Or he might just sleep. The potential for either option is never more than a few seconds away.

Of course, some things are just destined to go wrong. The moment you put your baby in the bassinet and he goes to sleep, there will be turbulence and you’ll be forced to take him out, bright and alert as a little meerkat. The moment you successfully navigate the Row 48 bathrooms and their slippery changing table and make it back triumphant to your seat, you will recognise a familiar straining expression on your baby’s face. The moment you’re sure that your son couldn’t possibly have any more burps and you just happen to lower that spill cloth for a couple of seconds, he will make sure to exploit that sartorial weakness so before long, his dried milk can mix in with that dried sweat from the taxi, earlier on. The moment you land, you will discover there’s been a mix up with the luggage and the carseat that’ll take a long time to fix and jeopardise your connection. It will be Lord of the Flies in the customs queue, you will miss your connecting flig