Confession time: yes, I stated at one point that we were willing to travel basically anywhere in the world with our children. That wasn’t really the truth, at least not until recently. The thought of hours upon hours in the plane combined with absurd time changes gave even me hives. Until Australia, we would choose one or the other: long transit times or crazy time changes.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my husband was able to score $500 round trip airfare to Sydney. How do you not go when the airfare is that cheap? I had a mini panic attack when we first bought the flights and then a massive panic attack the closer we got. It got so bad that I ended up buying a ton of stuff to keep the kids entertained on the plane – see previous post.

For the first time in our history, and to the utter delight of their parents, the children slept when they were supposed to. It was GLORIOUS! The flight to and from Australia is about 15 hours, not including domestic connections. And of those 15 hours, the girls slept 11 – both ways! They say history repeats itself. Perhaps. But I also completely understand our luck and our luck says that this will only happen once. I’m ok with that though… we took on a challenge and thanks to our ability to wear our kids out, we were rewarded with an amazing, albeit ridiculously long, fun day in the air! I’ll be honest – it was mostly fun for me. I got some sleep, drank some alcohol, and enjoyed 11 hours without having to entertain the children.

Our trip overall was just so, so much fun. I was a little apprehensive about taking on such a monstrous trip after we had such a rough time in Ecuador. But, I just took our family motto to heart (“Suck it up and deal!”) and made it work. Now, that’s not to say that everything went perfectly. We definitely learned something on this vacation. Previously, we would always try to stay up as long as possible, trying to stave off jet lag. We’ve had varied results with this approach so we decided to try something new – we would all take a nap and then grab dinner in an attempt to get to a time zone appropriate bedtime. When we tried to wake up our youngest from said nap, she was so tired that she worked herself into a frenzy and started vomiting. Abort mission! Abort mission! Poor kid. In the end, we let both the kids sleep, which they did until early the following morning.

What does this mean for future trips?? Well, first, it opens so many more doors. I love Asia and would love for my children to experience it for themselves. Now that I know they can handle the long flight, I am going to start taking those $500 12 night China trip deals much more seriously.

One final thing, mostly as a side note. In my last post, I mentioned some of the things that we were bringing to keep our children entertained (which we didn’t really end up needing because they slept so much!). The big winner of the bunch? The pipe cleaners! The kids LOVED them and were enthralled with them for most of the time they weren’t passed out.