Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part III: Car Hell

NOTE: Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part I: Packing can be found here and Part II: Surviving the Sleepocalypse can be found here.

After finishing our long car trip with our 4 month old daughter A., I confess that I have a bit of PTSD. She hasn’t slept as well as at home, but it hasn’t been a disaster. I haven’t forgotten anything major yet. However, the first leg of the car trip produced a solid 3 hours of screaming until she finally fell asleep.

I’m happy to say the return trip was a lot better. Here are some things we learned that helped our drive back go a lot more smoothly:

Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part II: Surviving the Sleepocalypse

NOTE: Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part I: Packing can be found here and Part III: Car Hell can be found here.

My daughter A. has never been a very good sleeper. First she had her days and nights mixed up (common for a newborn), then she cluster fed like crazy and wanted to eat all night long, then she had tummy issues, and right as we were finally resolving those she hit the 4 month sleep regression. Suddenly she was fighting sleep like crazy and all naps topped out at 45 minutes again.

This week we finally got some relief as she settled into one night waking (yay) and her naps started to lengthen again (double yay). And so, of course, this is the week we are traveling for Thanksgiving.

Along with packing for the trip, I have been desperately researching and planning ways to avoid completely screwing up my daughter’s sleep. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part I: Packing

NOTE: Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part II: Surviving the Sleepocalypse, can be found here and Part III: Car Hell can be found here.

This Thanksgiving, we are taking a major car trip with our 4 month old baby, “A”. While we’ve flown with her before, this is our first car trip, and our longest trip to date.

We have an ambitious trip planned – you could call it the show off the new baby tour – that involves swinging through Connecticut, Brooklyn, Long Island, New Jersey, and Rochester. Clearly, we were out of our minds when we planned this, but too late to go back now.

After much deliberation, I compiled an exhaustive list of everything that we could possibly need. Now I just have to figure out how to cram it into my Toyota Corolla.