GENERAL
While researching our first trip, I found the book Travels with Baby: The Ultimate Guide for Planning Trips with Babies, Toddlers, and Preschool-Age Children
to be invaluable. Although not geared toward Multiples, the book is full of useful information for a number of types of travel. Since my research, the author has published a second book, Take-Along Travels with Baby: Hundreds of Tips to Help During Travel with Your Baby, Toddler, and Preschooler
, which promises to be a "pocket-size survival manual for parents traveling with small children." 
FLYING MULTIPLIED
To Car Seat, or Not to Car Seat
On our first trip, we took car seats on board with us. We purchased the previous version of the Diono Radian R100 Car Seat
. The Radian is great for travel because the seat folds up and and goes into the handy travel case.
Unfortunately, multiple children means multiple Radians. While the Radian is easier to wrangle than a "standard" car seat, it's a lot to add to your hand luggage, stroller, and, well, your Multiples. Now imagine that one or more of your Multiples refuse to walk down the airplane aisle and you now have to carry your child along with the car seat (it's not pretty). Also, if you are on a long haul flight, taking up the whole seat means your little Multiples can't stretch out and lay down across their multiple seats. Our girls sat happily in the Radians for about four hours, but then refused to go anywhere near them. Of course, once you have the seats on board, you are pretty much stuck with them. We managed to fold one and stow it on the floor in front of the girls' seats, but the second one would not fit. For this reason alone, we would not take car seats into the cabin again.
If you decide not to take car seats into the cabin for your Multiples, you still need keep your Multiple safe during the flight. As highlighted by recent news reports of families being removed from flights, small children easily wiggle out of lap belts and refuse to stay seated. On our last trip, we brought the CARES Child Aviation Restraint System
. 
The CARES essentially converts the airline's lap belt to the five-point restraint that your child is used to from his or her car seat.
We found the CARES to be much more manageable than car seats and allowed our girls to lay down when they wanted to go to sleep.
What Happened to That Sippy Cup?
Traveling with small children means packing along all their stuff. However, actually getting to all the stuff you packed can be difficult once you stowed your carry-ons in the overhead bins (and all those people who watched you pre-board pile their stuff on top of your stuff) or under the seat in front of you. Inevitably, some of the stuff you do manage to unpack is going to wind up on the floor (ick!) and some of that stuff is never going to get found (like our second pair of Kidz Gear Headphones
last year). The Zen Class Travel Nirvana Seatback Organizer And Travel Tote
provides the perfect array of pockets and clips for managing all that stuff.
We each have our own organizer and tuck them into our seatback pockets upon reaching our seats. Once the pilot turns off the seatbelt sign, we install the organizers over our tray tables and the fun begins. The only drawback to the organizer is that the tray table needs to be in the upright position for use, which isn't overly helpful during meals or when your child is drawing or engaging in any other activity that requires the table. This year I am going to bring some big safety pins along to see if I can pin the organizer to the seat while the table is down. The organizer has rings in the two upper corners, so I think this should work. Next week, we'll start a checklist for all the stuff you can put in the organizer.
