My daughter is 16 months old today. And we’ve made it! We’re in Beijing, China. My traveling group consisted of my two grandparents (my in-laws), my husband, me, and my baby. Here’s the tough part, my in-laws of course are elderly. I’m 31 going on 32 weeks pregnant (huge basketball under my shirt). My baby was recently diagnosed with AOM (which I’ll write another post about how wrong i think that doctor was).

But my baby was definitely down with something, which she than gave to everybody else. (Knock on wood) – but I’ve been the most blessed through all this. Anyone can still imagine the stress of traveling with a group of sick people + old + baby + pregnant all the way from US to China.

Overconfident – we’ve done this before, when baby was 7 months old we took her to ShenZhen, China for 2.5 weeks in December. That was a successful trip! Thinking about how great that was, this should be easier right? Now that baby is older and walking.

NO! A walking baby is probably even worse on the plane. She was hard to control. A lot more fussy. My husband was still feeling sick and took a benadryl before getting on the plane – so he was pretty sedated. My mother-in-law wasn’t feeling too well either (which I will write another post about GERD and garlic and her). Then there’s me – who’s very very pregnant and my father-in-law still.

I guess I shouldn’t complain too much. She was a bit difficult while we were getting ready to take-off and I kept thinking “this is a bad idea, we should have stayed home”. Once the plane was in the air, she conked out for a couple of hours. Then she woke up again for maybe 5-6 more hours. Kept getting a nose bleed – freaking everybody out of course. But once she fell asleep again, she was asleep for good until we arrived in Beijing.

We got to Beijing around 5:30 staying at Grand Beijing Hyatt, who has the most amazing airport pickup service. I’m not huge on getting picked up by hotels usually, don’t really need to spend that kind of money. But this hotel’s service makes it seriously worth it.

First of all, they have runners that stay in the airport. Their job is to pick you up as soon as you literally get of the plane, even before going through customs. It helps a ton! Let’s just say Beijing Airport is a tad bigger than SFO (like 10x!) and even getting to customs and out can be confusing and it’s not easy with a baby. It’s nice that once we left the plane, there was someone to walk us through. He grabbed our bags for us then and at the luggage pick up of course. Then instead of going to the parking garage, we just needed to go down one floor to a special parking area where our car was waiting for us. They said they made sure we wouldn’t have to go to the parking lot - because it’s too hot for the baby.

The drive into town was maybe 30-40 minutes. Once we arrived, didn’t have to wait at the front desk. People were ready to pick us up at the front door. They grabbed our bags and a lady walked us up straight to our rooms.

This was definitely the smoothest check-in/transition I’ve ever experienced!

Gave baby a bath, we all showered right away. Baby fell asleep local time around 7:30/8:00 pm. The problem is that she woke up at midnight local time (since it is like 9 am her time). So now we’re just trying to keep her company.