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I had been dreading the flights back to England since the day we booked our tickets, knowing that Charlotte can’t keep still for 5 minutes let alone 21 hours.

I needn’t have worried, she was brilliant. In the few weeks before travelling we kept telling her how we were going on an aeroplane to see Granny, how it was going to be a very long journey and how important it would be to keep her seatbelt fastened. She took it all in, pointing up at passing planes and mimicking exactly what we’d said. She even played aeroplanes in the house, lining up her little chairs with her Elmos as passengers.

We chose the right time of day to fly and packed plenty of things to keep her occupied. The sedatives (for her, not me) helped too.

On the plane, once she was in her pyjamas and had drank her milk, she conked out watching Mickey Mouse on the Playhouse Disney channel — just like she does at home. Sara and I snatched a brief hour or two, but Charlotte was out for the count.

She got a bit fidgety during the last couple of hours on the longest leg, but Sara’s bagful of small new toys kept her entertained, although she wanted to slip out of her seat and play on the floor.

Altogether she ended up sleeping for two thirds of the time, including one of the take offs, both the landings, the whole of our transit time in Singapore and the bus between terminals at Heathrow.

We only had a couple of hours to kill before going our separate ways, so we played chase to tire her out for the final leg. I packed them off on their shuttle to Manchester and had only 15 minutes to cross Terminal 5 to catch my flight to Germany.

I’m typing this on my Blackberry on the train to the city centre — I felt wide awake when I landed, despite more than 36 hours on the road — so decided I didn’t need a taxi, as I knew exactly where I was going. I’ll tidy up this post and add some pictures when I get proper internet access at the hotel.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 1st, 2010 at 11:45 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.