Traveling with a 3mo - experience

I finished an annual local road trip fun conference that my husband and I do every year. Because we do this every year, I was pretty confident about the trip. I also read a lot of Reddit posts to prep, so I thought I’d write up my experience to add to the posts and provide some discussion of what was helpful or not helpful.

Some details:

Our baby was 12 weeks when we travelled. He was exclusively breastfed at time of travel. I had used a spectra 2 breast pump to establish supply and he was combo fed til 5 weeks, when he was suddenly able to latch. We had taken him on a 1 hour car ride before and taken him around in the stroller to prep. He sleeps in a rental snoo. We had a few failures to launch with our carriers (momcozy and ergo baby) which was stressful right before the trip.

In the month leading up to this trip I was able to make an extremely modest freezer stash (probably about 3-5 feedings)

Travel set up - what we took traveling:

- car (this allowed us to take everything)

- baby bouncer

- baby bjorn mini (! More on this later)

- snoo (not going to risk disrupting sleep)

- bottles, milk heater thermos

- outfits, wipes, diapers, etc

- owlet monitor, which we use at home

- modded out spectra (modded to be portable)

- cooler with frozen breast milk

- co parent

- meet with grandparent at location to help with childcare

Trip/Experience

So, I was pretty confident about the trip until about a week before, when our son started what I’ve now learned is called a Nursing Crisis or Nursing Strike. I had no idea what this was and to be fair some babies get it and some don’t. A quick summary is that the child has difficulty nursing because the world is too interesting to focus on nursing. Then they get over hungry and too dysregulated to eat. Because the world is interesting, their hunger cues can drop off, so it’s important to start keeping an eye of the last time they ate.

This is how we traveled for the 5 hour drive. Baby was pretty upset and hungry so lollll but unable to latch or keep latched once he started feeding. He had about 2 successful feeds during the trip which is under what he usually has. We learned that they feed better when they’re drowsy, so we helped him nap and then handed him off when he was hungry for nursing. It was very hard to soothe him and see friends and family with this system. Everyone was pretty upset but he did settle. He is a good sleeper and the snoo was easy to set up, so once he settled he did sleep well in the hotel. For the snoo and owlet I had to turn my phone to hotspot for a connection because they couldn’t connect to the hotel wifi. Difficult but not impossible.

We switched hotels on day 2. The first hotel didn’t have a fridge, so we asked the front desk and they were very well equipped to store the frozen breastmilk. The second hotel had a mini fridge but it sucked and the milk unfroze. I’m pretty sure some of it went bad as well. It was gut wrenching to throw some of it out.

It became clear very quickly that the grandparent did not know how to care for newborns or babies. So, we had to abandon that plan and adapt. This was the lowest point of the trip. Baby was crying and unsatisfied, having difficulty eating, grand parent was blasting videos on their phone while we were trying to get baby to nap so he could eat, etc. I was especially demoralized when I looked on Reddit and people said it was easiest to travel with 3 month olds. What was I doing wrong? Could I not handle this?

We ended up doing a few things that turned around the experience. For the nursing crisis, reintroducing bottles worked very well and allowed baby to still eat breastmilk. Baby was happy and able to look around/walk around with pumped milk while feeding. We kicked out grandparent and figured out the carrier. The baby loved being in the carrier. It turns out that although the other carriers said they worked for newborns, he needed the mini (despite being exactly average in height and weight).

We learned that the carrier was fantastic for the conference. He was even able to be on the panel with me and my husband (grandparent was supposed to watch him during the panel but it turns out he’s better at visiting than baby sitting).

I was able to nurse whenever possible and pump and bottle feed otherwise. After we adapted, things were a lot better. The trip back was much chiller and instead of crying and struggling (as we did during the trip there), he slept and hung out for the trip back.

Summary

I am happy we traveled. It was so nice to be out of the house and see friends. Obviously, I worked on this trip but I love my work and it was so nice to fuse our lives before the baby with our lives since the baby.

I wanted to write this up because our experience as not “easy” or “a dream” as I’ve seen described on reddit posts. However, we did level up as parents and I don’t regret it.

Does anyone have similar experiences?