Are you taking a trip with your baby for the first time? Use these tips for packing for your baby and feel a little less stress!
Traveling with a baby has proven to be quite stressful. I usually start worrying about the trip a week in advance. Will she cry on the car ride? What if I forget her favorite pacifier? Will she sleep at XX’s house? What if she gets sick?
And then there is the whole part about packing for your baby. I swear… this girl needs more stuff for a weekend away than her Momma needs for a cruise.
Annabelle wears at least two outfits a day (we usually have a diaper blow out), plus she wears jammies at night. Each outfit is accompanied by a pair of socks and a hair bow or hat. She needs diapers, wipes, diaper cream. She needs stuff for tubby time – towel, wash cloths, soap.
A baby needs a Rock N Play and Halo (or muscle fleece as we call it) to sleep in. She needs her sound machine and Bunny and binky. She needs her car seat and stroller. AND she needs toys. And her play mat. And extra blankets. And burp cloths. And I need my breast pump. And baby bottles. And so on.
Now do you see why packing for your baby is so stressful!?
I have come up with a few solutions to reduce the amount of luggage little Miss Annabelle travels with. One solution is to have duplicates of the big stuff where ever we are going. For example, if we are going to a Grandparent’s house – they have bought a Pack-N-Play for her to sleep in.
At my parent’s house in CT, we are borrowing a car seat, stroller, tubby, and play mat. Small items, such as diapers, wipes, and bath stuff, are easy to pick up once we are at our destination. We recently discovered that we can use the iPad as a sound machine, so that saves us some more space!
READ MORE: TIPS FOR PACKING LIGHTLY FOR A TRIP WITH KIDS
Packing clothes for a little girl is can be a difficult process. Each of her outfits has to have a top, bottom, socks, and usually a hair bow or a hat. I lay all of her outfits out first. Then I add the socks. I usually try to pick socks that will match more than one outfit since she can wear the same pair multiple times (baby doesn’t really get her feet dirty these days). Last, I pick out hair bows.
Here is the biggest problem: baby clothes are small and when they are put in a suitcase, the outfits get all mixed up. Then when it is time to get her dressed, we have to search through the bag for all the pieces to her outfit. Annabelle’s Daddy does NOT like this… poor little peanut would end up with mismatched socks and no pants if I didn’t do something to fix this problem.
I pack each outfit for my baby in a Ziploc bag.
Individually packed outfits keeps everything organized AND it makes it easy for Daddy to grab something for her to wear. It takes up less space in the suitcase – and if I had one of those fancy machines that sucked all the air out of storage bags, I’d be even better in the packing department.
On our recent trip to Disney, Savanna was only 5 months old. It was SO hard to pack for her, especially because we were flying! I did what you did with the Ziploc bags and it totally helped! I’ll be doing the same for our upcoming trips!
I was just telling a friend yesterday about packing her baby’s outfits in ziplock bags for their trip to Europe! It is seriously the best idea because their clothes are so tiny haha And even as an adult it’s useful, my husband and i just got back from backing S.E. Asia and i would put all my tank tops in one, all my t-shirts in another and so on and it made life soooo easy. You can even zip them mostly up and squeeze the air out before closing them to compress it pretty good, definite space saver. It sounds like you’ve got this packing thing down to an art 😀
I love the idea of putting each outfit in a separate baggies! I wish I had known about that when my son was first born, because we make a 6 hour drive back home every four months or so and it is so hard to stay organized with a baby! and I love the idea of putting the socks with the outfit.. because it never fails that my husband puts on the complete opposite color socks from the outfit!
I read about the Ziploc bag trick on I Love You More Than Carrots’ blog. I know when we have kids we’ll probably forget about that but good for you for finding that!
Does the sound machine really help that much in helping her fall asleep? Do you use it in her room or does she still sleep in the bassinet next to you?
Genius idea – I remember when Amelia was 8-9 months old, my father passed away and my sister was married all in a month period – we were traveling to Oklahoma and St. Thomas and it was a disaster – everything got so mixed up and I will so remember this the next time we have a baby 🙂
Hey, you’ve mentioned diaper blowouts a couple times — have you thought about moving up a size in diapers? For us blowouts were a sign that baby needed a little more space. Just a thought!
When we travel I always just assume we’ll need to do laundry at some point. We’re always traveling to parents’ houses or friends’ houses, and it’s not like they don’t have washing machines. I have found that since I’ve accepted that I’ll probably have to wash things, I get a lot less stressed about having everything. I like your Ziploc idea too.