Flying with kids: Day or night?

It’s always a dilemma, isn’t it: Which flight time is best when you’ve got little kids in tow?

I used to be a day-flight mum, thinking that any sleep the children had would just be extra G&T and reading time for me, while, if they didn’t sleep on a night flight, I still had to get through a whole day feeling beyond terrible.

Look, there’s DS in the third window, waving cheerily at 4am

Then DD got bigger and more amenable and I got into night flights as [whispers furtively] at least you don’t have to entertain kids stuck in a seat for seven and a half hours. We had a couple of great night flights, when DD just got on the plane and conked out – but last year I had the night-flight from hell. DS fell asleep before take-off around 10pm, then woke up half an hour later and stayed awake all flipping night (I have a policy of not swearing on the blog, but sometimes you just need to add some imagination to my wording).

Not just awake, but running round the cabin shouting “Where’s the captain?” with me running around after him, hissing, at one point, “Ssh! Sit down! And go to sleep! Or the captain will stop the plane and make you get off!” (sorry: Desperate times, crappy parenting, knackered, 3am).

So I vowed only to do only day flights until DS is big enough to understand the value of mummy getting a reasonable night’s sleep.

But the day flights, they’re just so trying with an immature three-year-old. During take-off, DS is the one standing up and climbing over the armrest. He needs the loo just as the food comes. Then he falls asleep while he should be eating. He knocks my champagne over. He loses his toys. The headphones fall off. He’s hungry when there’s no food.

DD, she inhales the chocolate bars and E-number sweets in the EK “snack pack” then bounces off the walls. (Why do they give kids sugar highs when they’re contained to a space of less than one square metre for seven hours?)

So, maybe next year, maybe we’ll try another night flight. What do you think? At least there’s no snack packs on the night flights.