The One Toddler Toy I Never Travel Without (Bonus: It’s Less than $10!)

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Things no one tells you about parenting: flying with a toddler is (often) much harder than flying with a baby. They aren’t guaranteed to fall asleep, you can’t just feed them to calm them down and they are not as easily entertained.

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Before a long-haul flight last year I did a sweep of ‘how to survive a flight with a toddler’ advice on various mom groups, and universally everyone recommended Melissa & Doug's Habitats Reusable Sticker Pad. It’s pretty genius: it offers four ‘habitats’ — one for dinosaurs, a farm, the ocean and a safari scene — and dozens of colorful, reusable animal clings that ‘live’ in them.

The book itself is quite big, so I took all of the clings out of it and put them into four different Ziploc bags by habitat. Every time we fly now, we let our 2½-year-old son take the window seat and go to town arranging the various creatures in all sorts of ridiculous configurations. It cracks him up and flight attendants like it, too, because unlike stickers, these don’t leave a residue. I once even had a grandmother ask me about them (and buy them on the spot) for her kids’ kids.

On our most recent flight this weekend, we had the iPad “just in case,” but Henry was still endlessly entertained by the window clings. And I am eternally grateful to Melissa & Doug for the relative peace.

Buy It! Melissa & Doug Habitats Reusable Sticker Pad, $8.55; amazon.com