Toddling on a LONG plane ride

I have read a lot of posts this summer about travelling with kids, but it's all been regarding car travel. As we were looking at a 13+ hour plane ride I knew my prep would be different since I would have serious space constraints.

Here's what I packed:

- A change of clothes in a Ziploc bag, including a light jacket.

- A laptop and handful of favorite movies

- Card games (laminated and in a Ziploc near) -

• Star matching pack that we played a math game with.
• Opposite flash cards
• Halloween matching game

- Lots of colouring pages (these were actually only moderately successful. Chiquita doesn't color for long periods of time and some pages got wet when water leaked from a sippy cup)

- Ziploc bags of Chiquita's favorite snacks

- 3 of Chiquita's favorite board books

- A few very small plastic toys

- A few other flat busy bag games that we didn't end up playing at all (can't win 'em all!)

My supplies were not enough. Here are some of our other methods of entertainment, particularly for the 15 or so minutes of take off and landing when all our stuff had to be put away:

• Bare hand puppets.  Chiquita loves crocodile (my left hand) and monster (my right hand).  They frequently play doctor or babies or whatever Chiquita dreams up.  Daddy's hands are snakes and play a little less often.  Warning - this involves adult silliness which I know can be hard to muster at the end of a 13 hour plane ride when you've only had 4 hours of sleep, and once you've started you may never fully get your hands back.
• Letter search.  We opened the in flight magazine and started looking for the big letter E.  I was surprised we were able to play this game for almost 5 minutes at a time.
• Picture scavenger hunt.  Same as above but looking for dogs, dolphins or whatever Mommy thought we might find.
• Singing action songs (i.e. "Este es el piquito", "Un Elefante").  Mommy sang very quietly, while the same could not always be said of Chiquita.  Sorry neighbors.

We finally arrived!  Then it was time for jet lag, but that's another post...