Flying to London with kids… on my own!

Well hello! It’s been a while. Back in June I wrote about developing a “minimum once sentence a day” writing habit, which was going well for about a month. But then we went on holiday and ever since I’ve completely dropped the ball. And now here we are, two months later, and I'm attempting to recreate my writing habit. Better late than never I suppose!

 

This is my first post about our recent holiday, which we took over the winter school holidays in June/July. Andy and I both had three weeks off from school, however unfortunately this year they were not the same three weeks. My last day of school was June 17th, and Andy’s was a week later on June 24th. We went back and forth about what to do about this. We considered only going for two weeks (not ideal with the jet lag for the kids) or not going at all (even less ideal considering we hadn’t seen Andy’s family in England since 2019 due to Covid). Eventually we decided that I would go with the kids on my own on the 17th and Andy would join us a week later, and then I would go home a week earlier and Andy would stay on with the kids for his last week of holidays. This way the kids would end up having a nice long four weeks to spend overseas with family. 

As it happens, my school generously gave me three days of leave at the end of term, so we were able to have an even longer trip. All in all, the kids had a full month in Europe… not too shabby!

We left Melbourne on an 11:30pm flight on a Tuesday night. We all had a full day of work and school, then came home, had dinner and baths and headed to the airport around 7:30pm. I was afraid the kids would be super tired but they were pretty wired and excited for the trip. The only hiccup was saying goodbye to Andy, both kids were very sad that he wasn’t coming with us right away.

The check-in process was pretty long, about a 45 minute wait. For whatever reason Australian citizens were not able to check-in online so there was a big queue even though we arrived about 3.5 hours before our flight. (Reading this two months later, I’d say we got off easy given all the travel chaos in Europe this summer!) From then on it was pretty smooth, both security and passport control were really quick. It definitely helped that we were travelling a few days before the start of the school holidays. As a teacher I’m pretty envious of everyone who can travel outside school holidays on a regular basis!

It had been ages since we’d been to the international terminal at Melbourne airport. In fact the last time would have been when we left Australia in March 2019. Not much was open as it was very late in the evening, though it’s not like you can do any browsing in shops when you’re on your own with a 4 and 7 year old. They were both hungry but most places had stopped serving food. We ended up with eclairs from Brunetti… delicious but not the most nutritious food to be eating just before you’re about to have a full day’s worth of airplane/airport food. It did stop the kids complaining about being hungry at least, although I did also have to break into my stash of snacks and give them some popcorn as well.

The funniest thing here was Ella lost her front tooth while eating. Like literally lost it… all of the sudden she was like “my tooth fell out” and we have no idea where it went. Most likely she swallowed it. Ew but hopefully not a big deal!

We flew with SingaporeAir who I was pretty impressed with. They were so great with the kids, they seemed to make a special effort with them, including serving their meals first and giving them a little toy. They even knew their names when we boarded which was a nice touch.

Our first flight to Singapore was just over 7 hours and it was a pretty easy flight. I thought the kids would crash straightaway but they stayed up for dinner service and then fell asleep about 2 hours into the flight. I managed to get some sleep as well and we all woke with less than 2 hours to go.

Here they are at the start of the flight. It’s all looking pretty civilized at this stage… the iPads aren’t even out yet!

We had just under 4 hours at Singapore airport before our second flight. There is a lot to do and see at this airport so it was kind of a nice length stopover. It gave us time to chill out, get something to eat, and do a bit of exploring.

Everyone was pretty tired when we first arrived and it was really early, like 5:30am, when we landed in Singapore. So again we had the problem of not much being open. We camped out on the floor for a bit in an empty part of the terminal and played a few games and FaceTimed Andy. 

Next we checked out the butterfly garden, where it was nice to feel like we were in nature in the middle of such a long flight. 

But the big hit for the kids was the koi carp pond. The kids loved looking at the fish and conveniently there was a Pret A Manger right next to it. Pret is like my go-to place when I travel, it reminds me so much of when I lived in London. We had a nice time in this part of the airport, and I was even able to sit and have a coffee while the kids were entertained by the pond.

We also FaceTimed my parents, who were also at the airport in Toronto, waiting to board their own flight to London to meet us. 

Before we knew it, it was time to head to the gate for flight number two. This flight was much longer, about 13.5 hours from Singapore to London. And boy did it feel long! The kids were awake for the first 8 hours apart from an hour long nap that Ollie had. Ella asked me about every 15 minutes how long we had left… I tried showing her how to read it on the flight info on her screen but that didn’t really stop her from asking me. Nothing major happened but it just felt loooong. I attempted to watch a movie and got through about ¾ of House of Gucci. (How does it end?! I’ll never know…) Ella watched one movie while Ollie napped but other than that neither were interested in watching movies. Gah! I thought for sure they’d watch a few! Ollie loved his iPad and I ended up having to limit his screen time, otherwise I think he would have played on it non stop. I’ve learned firsthand just how addictive those things are for a four year old!! (Strangely Ella could take or leave her iPad… maybe it’s because she’s a bit older??)

Eventually with about 4-5 hours to go I convinced them to try and sleep. Ella had both the Kooshy foot rest and pillow I hastily bought a week before our flight, so I was happy that they got some use. She really liked having the foot rest in general and it was really easy to blow up with the electric pump it came with. Ollie is still small enough to curl up on his seat, especially if I lifted up then arm rest between us. Him and I were able to sort of cuddle up together and we all managed to shut our eyes for a few hours before landing at Heathrow.

Landing at Heathrow, going through customs, collecting our luggage and the taking a taxi to our Airbnb seemed like the longest part of our travel. We were all quite tired by then and it seemed like we were SO close to seeing my mom and dad as our taxi crept through the London rush hour traffic. But finally, about 3.5 hours after landing, we arrived to big hugs from Nannie and Grampy. I was so happy that the kids weren’t weird around them, and were chatting and playing with them as if they’d just seen each other the day before. Of course my mom had picked up some wine so we could enjoy a drink in the garden of our Airbnb in the gorgeous London sunshine, catching up and just generally excited to be starting our holiday together!