Hellobee Boards

How exciting! With an almost 4 year old, you’ll find traveling is not as hard as you thought. We’ve flown 14 hours straight with my daughter when she was 11 months and also right before she turned 4. They have inflight entertainment, we took the iPad, she did some workbook games, she slept when she was supposed to. It was no biggie.

We had almost the same flight set-up as your second example above when we flew from Boston to Switzerland to Florence, Italy (flight was less than an hour from Switzerland to Florence) when LO was 4 and she wasn't grumpy at all for the short layover and short flight and the second flight wasn't miserable.

We did an overnight from Boston to Switzerland and will always try to do that with littles. She ate dinner on the plane, watched a movie and then was old enough to understand that it was then bedtime. When we landed in Switzerland she had slept a decent night's sleep (we had not lol), and was fine for the layover and second flight. DH and I just grabbed coffees and were good to go as well. Doing the overnight also helped with jetlag - no one had any since we could start our days on Italy time correctly on day 1 of the trip.

Have fun!

I would consider the trip home and arrange it so that I would not have a connecting flight in the US, because trying to get bags and clear customs at first point of entry and make a connection can be tight.

I would do the NYC layover. You'll have to do customs/border control once you arrive to Italy and I'd hate trying to do that with a flight to catch.

I also second @Beehive's suggestion. Only adjust your kid at most halfway to the new time zone. This is what we do with our kids in Europe and it limits jetlag coming home and makes for a more enjoyable vacation. In Italy especially a lot of restaurants won't open until 7 or 8 for dinner so pushing bedtime back is a must if you want to do anything in the evening.

@MrsLonghorn: I know you found your solution ( ) but wanted to throw another option out there. We rented a carseat and biking/ hiking sturdy strolled (like a BOB) from a babygear rental place in Italy. There are several, if you Google them. It was super reasonably priced and nice not to have to haul gear ourselves. Not everyone might be comfortable dong so, but the places we contacted were all very professional and the gear we received was in excellent condition.