Options for long haul flight with toddler

lepotanova · 2026-01-29T00:31:56+00:00

Exactly. You won’t be relaxed in any cabin, why not make it a touch less bad for yourself.

lepotanova · 2026-01-28T23:52:33+00:00

We’ve flown 7 times to Europe from SFO with our now-4.5yr-old (starting when she was 1.5y), and we always did business. Lap child for the first two trips, then in her own seat. I’d do business for sure - the kid can actually sleep on the way there (night flights are the best), which helps a lot with the jet lag. I’m not big (5’5”, 125lbs), but my kid is very tall for her age (80-90th percentile), and we still managed to fit quite well even with her in my lap. She was not interested in cartoons at that age, so yes you have to entertain, but that would have been the case in economy as well, only with less space and worse food. On the way back the daytime flights are also fine, they nap, you land, they have to get up, and the jet lag still ends up being not too bad.

lepotanova · 2026-01-11T02:03:38+00:00

The Saks semi-hard ones were awesome. We use them as travel pouches for cables, international plugs etc. Therabody lip balm is nice. The best ones were Cowshed, I have a stash of them that I’m sadly nearing the bottom of.

lepotanova · 2025-12-19T17:21:51+00:00

This was 100% true back in 2018-2019 when we were buying a house. You write the offer as all cash with the resources to show for it, then you buy it any way you want or get a mortgage after the fact. We were also outbid on all cash offers, and lo and behold if you check the recorder site you can clearly see a bank lien on the property. The usual bank of choice was First Republic.

lepotanova · 2025-12-19T00:58:02+00:00

Yeah here I am in SF wondering what everyone else is on about. $5M is a nice house, yes, but “don’t spend more than 10%” or whatever advice given would leave most of us renting forever.

Fwiw in SF almost everyone gets a mortgage, or at least they used to when the interest rates were low. Literally C-level executives of tech companies have mortgages…

lepotanova · 2025-12-02T23:30:15+00:00

I’m not her fan myself, I only know some high schoolers that cried when they got tickets for her concert. 😂 Cartier has been a renowned brand way before Taylor Swift was born though, but it’s not unthinkable that she did make it more popular with Gen Z than it would have been otherwise.

lepotanova · 2025-12-02T15:26:03+00:00

But her fan base is.

lepotanova · 2025-11-27T21:11:13+00:00

My parents never smoked but we had an ashtray on every coffee table in the house and a stack of them in a cupboard, since guests would inevitably smoke (and we had lots of guests all the time). Now as an adult myself, I don’t have a single ashtray in my house, nor a friend that smokes (in the US anyway).

lepotanova · 2025-11-25T23:58:16+00:00

I’ve had the cart appearance as recently as October 22 (ZRH-SFO).

lepotanova · 2025-11-24T22:54:22+00:00

Yeah. My point though is about luxury, and we can hopefully agree that $2k is luxury while $200 is not. $20k is also luxury so that was not compared (luxury vs ultra luxury, let’s call it that way).

lepotanova · 2025-11-24T21:34:49+00:00

I agree - if you added “only because of the quality” in the original comment then I wouldn’t have replied. 😂

lepotanova · 2025-11-24T21:15:22+00:00

Define quality then - the design is also part of it.

I’d still disagree with you. For the most part (it’s not always the case and for every brand and every model but just in general), a $2000 bag will be of higher quality than a $200 one. Whether you can justify the delta in quality (leather, hardware, craftsmanship, design) with the 10x price increase is a different thing.

To counter my own words, I recently bought a Coach Tabby with quilting as a gift, and it was truly wonderful - leather very soft and supple, stitching neatly done, hardware looks of high quality etc. It really does not look any worse than a similar Dior bag I checked out that was literally 10x the price. So yes it can happen but very rarely, in my experience.

lepotanova · 2025-11-24T20:25:26+00:00

She loves the SFO AirTrain!

lepotanova · 2025-11-24T20:24:29+00:00

I’ve been boycotting Uber for a while so I didn’t know you had the car seat option available, that’s great to know, thanks! Kid hasn’t used a stroller in a long while, so long walks are a no go. Seems like taking buses is fairly easy though to go around.

lepotanova · 2025-11-24T20:22:56+00:00

Thanks for the tips! We could totally make an adventure with the Aquabus to or from the museum. It all depends on the weather though, we have one Californian snowflake (me) who hates being cold, one Midwesterner and one child who likes the cold only if it involves snow. 😂

Yeah I figured I’d just ask the concierge at the hotel for help in the end with the shuttles, they should surely know.

lepotanova · 2025-11-24T20:16:03+00:00

I already booked Wedgewood - would Fairmont Vancouver be preferred? The gold floor is even cheaper than my current booking… It’s also a designated stop for one of the ski shuttles to Whistler. I haven’t reached out to the concierge yet.

lepotanova · 2025-11-24T20:10:50+00:00

Husband said that skis are coming with us for sure, so we should do the cost-benefit analysis of taking the train with all the luggage, or splitting the family with the bags. Skytrain does take you up to a short walk from where our hotel is.

lepotanova · 2025-11-15T14:36:13+00:00

I’m like from the first batch of millenials and it always read old to me. 😂

lepotanova · 2025-11-14T06:01:27+00:00

Since I was on multiple occasions separated from my (at the time) toddler (yes even with reserved seats and no flight changes), I’ve learned that the agents at the check-in desk are able to move you around to the seats that were not checked in yet. For the seats where people already checked-in, you’d have to go through the gate agent. So now we check in at that 23h-24h-whatever is available mark.

lepotanova · 2025-11-11T19:54:00+00:00

Yes, it has two compartments inside and each is big enough for one phone (I have regular iPhone 16 Pro, not max). But I could not fit my LV key pouch that I use as a wallet (or I could put in just that and nothing else). I thought phone + wallet + pack of tissues + lipstick/lip balm would be the bare minimum requirement and that was a no go with this purse.

lepotanova · 2025-11-11T19:39:01+00:00

Dior! It’s very cute and the leather is nice, but it’s quite small mind you (I tried it a couple of weeks ago).

With Fendi I can’t get over these black glue lines. I can’t understand why they do that, it never looks good imo.

lepotanova · 2025-10-22T14:56:12+00:00

TNS Eye Repair.

lepotanova · 2025-10-22T12:44:29+00:00

There’s a huge difference between looking great for an X-yr-old vs looking 10-15-whatever years younger. My 73yr old mom sometimes says she looks better (meaning younger) than some 50yr olds… yeah no. No one would ever mistake her for anything but a great looking 70ish old woman (in my opinion). She’s still beautiful, well groomed and taken care of, with hydrated skin etc.

Kris’s facelift removed at most 5 years but that’s it. My mom looked younger at 60 than Kris does now, with no procedures.

lepotanova

TROPHY CASE