

Instead, he writhed - and still kicked me in the face. He could not simply lie down with his head on the seat and his legs on the cushion, like all the adorable photos I had perused online. When I tried The Original Fly Tot on my red-eye to Costa Rica, the issue I had was that my three-year-old is actually the size of a large five-year-old. You’d think they’d help, right?! Will The Original Fly Tot Work for My Kids? What my kids were doing while I inflated The Original Fly Tot. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of this feature, as any gap between the cushion and the seat would make the whole “bed” idea less workable. It also has a nice v-shape, which means that the top of it inflates so that it fits tightly against the airplane seat and the seat back in front of you. This makes it a great footrest, perfect for an older child whose legs dangle on a plane or in a car. You can inflate just one compartment, making the cushion shorter. There’s no way around the fact that any of these inflatable cushions are going to be somewhat awkward to carry on to a plane and then inflate on the plane, but The Original Fly Tot makes it as painless as possible with the location of the valves and the way in which the cushion and the pump fold up.Īnother excellent feature of The Original Fly Tot is the two different-sized compartments. It inflates pretty quickly with the pump. The Original Fly Tot, on the other hand, comes with a hand/foot pump that all my kids were eager to try out. The knock-off was a plasticky-smelling basic inflatable rectangular cushion that took an awful lot of deep breaths to inflate (and as someone who has to yell at three boys a lot, deep breaths are in short supply around here). It’s kind of a long story, but I actually had a generic, cheap knock-off I bought on Amazon for comparison - and there was no comparison.

First of all, it’s a good quality product. I tried out The Original Fly Tot on a red-eye to Costa Rica last month. Is The Original Fly Tot Better Than its Competitors? This is not the intended purpose of The Original Fly Tot, FYI. I’m not really sure where I was when this first came out (probably hiding in my bedroom, covered in spit-up, wearing a three-day-old nightgown, and nursing an infant), but I I traveled with all three of my kids during the first years of their lives, and I sure wish I’d known about it. The Original Fly Tot is an ingenious solution for families flying with very young children. Unless, of course, you have come up with an invention that extends the surface of the seat so that it forms a flat bed for said kicky child. If they are taller than about eighteen inches, this is going be a problem, and you are likely to get kicked in the face. As anyone who has been on a long-haul flight with a child knows, they will eventually need to lie down.

The Original Fly Tot is an inflatable cushion designed to fit in the space between the airplane seat and the seat back in front of it, creating a flat surface so a child can lie down and sleep. Very rarely do I wish I could go back in time to red-eye flights with tiny tots, but trying out The Original Fly Tot cushion almost made me wish just that. My youngest child is now three years old, and every day I thank my lucky stars I am no longer changing diapers on airplanes.
