Travelling to Dubai with a three year old & a one year old

We’ve just got back from a lovely winter break to Dubai so thought I’d share my experience on travelling, Dubai in general and of course, jet lag. We spent half of it staying with friends and half of it in a hotel. 

Flights

The flight out to Dubai is around 6-7 hours out and 7-8 hours back. The majority of the flight options out there were night flights which I was so up for. The girls are pretty good sleepers so surely a night flight would be dreamy rather than having to entertain them for 8 hours straight. Wrong. It wasn’t helped that Ottie (the one year old) fell unwell just as we were leaving with a stinking cold - she was so sad and uncomfortable which made the night fight was so far from what I’d anticipated. 

To be fair to Hallie (nearly 3 1/2 at the time of flying) she was in her element. She was sat next to a boy the same age, she loved the plane food and general experience and watched a film and a half, then the boy next to her fell asleep so I convinced her to sleep and she slept until everyone had got off the plane in Dubai at which point she was pretty grumpy to have been woken and moved. 

Ottie on the other hand was turning one out there and when they put the bassinet up I tried to put her in it and she would just about fit but it was a real squish with her head pressed up against the end. Not ideal, especially for a tummy sleeper like herself. She did try to sleep on me but where she wasn’t well every 10 minutes she would rear back cry out and then resettle. So she wasn’t crying throughout but she wasn’t peacefully asleep. Meaning I wasn’t sleeping… so every minute that went by was another minute I wasn’t sleeping. Our flight was delayed on take off meaning we got into Dubai at 7:30am having not slept. 

It did all work out in that we got to our friends and then all four of us had a three hour nap which saved the day. 

The flight back was a day flight which I was dreading but it was so easy compared to the night flight. Hallie’s a little telly bug so she literally sat and watched TV for the entire flight, only leaving her seat to go to the loo or go and say hi to the little boy who she made friends with on the way out. Ottie slept for half an hour on take off and then later I took her for a walk in the sling and then sat back down and she slept for an hour and 45. Whilst she was awake she crawled around at our feet and then we’d take her for walks up and down the aisle. Sounds arduous but time actually went pretty quickly. 

We’d packed so many toys - two trunki’s full for both kids. Hallie needed nothing (Emirates also gave our colouring packs for her). What worked for Ottie was a zip lock bag full of little toys she could work her way through. I also could have packed a lot lighter as literally didn’t get anything down from my bag.

Emirates don’t offer including baby items like easyJet and other airlines down, it just comes out of your luggage allowance. We were over both ways and they were fine with it. We literally took everything, car seats, a travel buggy and a travel cot. 

Jet lag

Dubai is four hours ahead, we generally adjusted pretty quickly as we were so knackered from the flight the girls went to bed perhaps two hours earlier than usual (so at 9pm Dubai time which would have been 5am UK time). We pushed this back over the days and were pretty flexible. Sometimes they would go to bed closer to 7pm and sometimes it would be more like 8:30pm depending on our plans. 

Generally they would sleep until around 8/8:30am Dubai time and that stayed pretty consistent. 

Hallie was definitely in a bit of a sleep deficit for lots of it so we encouraged her to nap when we could, we perhaps got 3 naps out of her total, but these didn’t affect bedtime as she was still catching up. 

Coming back the girls fell asleep on the way back from the airport (around 5pm UK time, 9pm Dubai time). I thought they would need to be awake for a bit when they got home before going back down but they both fell apart they were so tired and we’d obviously interrupted their night time sleep so we just got them to bed asap and they slept until around 5am. This has then been getting later and later as each day has gone on. 

Dubai in general for kids

From what we saw, Dubai was really well set up for kids. They’re really into kids, lots of cooing over Ottie and smiling at Hallie. All restaurants had kids menus. The hotel had a kids club which Hallie went to a couple of times. They were seemingly relaxed about the kids (Ottie) making a mess at meal times and would tell me not to clean up her mess as they would do it. 

It felt friendly, safe and in January the weather was perfect. Mid - high 20’s but the sun wasn’t super strong so no real concern over the kids getting sunburnt. 

All in all I’d highly recommend and hope to go back next year, we’ll be getting a day flight out there next time though.