There is only one way to fly, and that is without young children. But if young ones come as standard at the moment and you can't resist the lure of distant parts - or the pestering of faraway grandparents (my family come from Toronto) - you, too, will find yourself approaching the check-in desk with an overloaded trolley and heavy heart.
The bad news is: there's actually something worse than being cooped up in a steel tube for 14 hours with two restless youngsters. That is walking the streets of a strange city at 3am, dead on your feet, having to deal with the demands of overexcited children just getting their second wind.
Having travelled long-haul en famille more times than I care to remember, my experience has been that the jetlag, yours and theirs, is worse than the travel itself. It certainly lasts longer. It can take children up to a day to reorientate their body clocks for each hour's time change. On a holiday to Los Angeles, that can mean a week in each direction.
So pay attention to the time your flight arrives. If arriving in the morning, resist an overnight flight if you can. For all the lure of enjoying the in-flight movie with them asleep in your lap, you'll pay for it when you get there, fortified by only a couple of hours of broken sleep and with an entire day to get through before you can go to bed and try to get into the right time zone.
We once had a daytime flight from Singapore when our children, then 18 months and four, slept for only two hours each during the 14 hours. It was hell, but we were rested enough to deal with it, and were all exhausted when we got back to London late in the afternoon. We had an early night and the next morning woke up at roughly the right time for the time zone - not in the least jetlagged.
To help you survive that purgatory in the sky here are some other suggestions born of bitter experience.
Entertainment
Don't bring too many toys on board. The children will be too excited or bored to play with half of them and they will only clutter your already claustrophobic personal space. Babies need little. Toddlers can be amused for hours - all right, minutes - by crayons and colouring books, or even blank paper.
Duplo is a good choice, particularly if you include some wheels and little men among the blocks so they can make and remake rudimentary transport vehicles, but forgo the Lego. You'll spend the flight rescuing little bits off the floor.
Try to fly with the increasing number of airlines that offer passengers their own television screen. Your little one can watch cartoons and you might even be able to see snatches of one of those films you never get round to seeing at the cinema any more. Otherwise, a personal stereo with story tapes is invaluable.
Seats
This is a tough one. With babies it's no contest - opt for the bulkhead where a cot can be hung off the wall, and your child will be amused by the gyrations of the flight attendant during the safety instructions. Once your child outgrows that, but is not yet two and a paying customer, it gets tricky. BA recently introduced a type of car seat which an almost two-year-old should be able to fit into on some of its trans-atlantic routes.
Airlines will try to allocate an under-two a seat if there are any spare, but remind the check-in clerk. These days, with the airlines consolidating flights, it is rarer to get a free seat, and you and your partner might have to split up. It may be worth it not to have a wriggling toddler on your lap for 11 hours.
You might fancy the extra leg-room of a bulkhead or exit-aisle seat, but nowadays not many airlines allow children to sleep on the floor. A disadvantage of the bulkhead is that these generally have rigid dividers between the seats, meaning you can't lift the arm to curl your feet under you or allow a child to half-lie on you.
If there are three of you it may be better just to ask for a middle row. These are usually less crowded than the window seats, and you will often get a precious extra seat. Anyone else inadvertently sat there will often take one horrified look and ask to be moved as far away from you as possible.
Clothes
Pack a few sets of spare clothes for your nappy-bound child, and one for yourself as well. Sitting in a drafty plane with a T-shirt splattered with yoghurt is not pleasant.
Food
Even if both of you are carnivores, one parent should opt for the vegetarian meal. Beyond usually being more palatable, this will generally arrive early, with the children's meals, allowing you to eat in shifts, one coping with the children, the other eating in relative peace. And try to resist the wine with your meal and coffee afterwards. These will knock out your body clock even further.
Once you're there
After a punishing flight, you shouldn't plan to do much for the first day or two. We made that mistake when we flew into Los Angeles when our eldest son was just two. After staying at a miserable motel near the airport, where trains shuttled outside our window all night, we picked up our hire car and drove five hours to the edge of Death Valley national park, our son protesting most of the time.
The following morning even getting within a few feet of the car sent him into paroxysms of terror. We ended up being stranded in a one-horse town for a second night, unable to do anything but wheel the pushchair up and down the main street, fuelled by copious amounts of coffee and pancakes.
Our ambitions for travel for the rest of the trip were scaled way back to a few hours on the road every two or three days. The pictures we have from that trip are fantastic, but we still shudder when we think about it.
