My Favorite Baby Toy for Plane Rides: Cheap, Simple, And Actually Works
Last March, I was 45 minutes into a cross-country red-eye with my 9-month-old Lila, and I’d already burned through every travel toy I’d spent $60 curating over the previous week. The crinkle sensory book got thrown into the seat pocket behind me before we even left the tarmac. The silicone stacking blocks ended up under the seat in front of me, and I wasn’t about to contort myself into a pretzel to fish them out when the person sitting there was already asleep. The light-up teether that all the parenting TikTokers swore by was too bright for the dim cabin, and when I turned it off, Lila lost all interest immediately. She was squirming in my lap, grabbing at the flight attendant’s soda cart, and the older woman next to me had closed her book 10 minutes prior and was staring straight ahead, jaw tight. I fumbled into the bottom of my diaper bag, past the extra diapers and a crumpled bag of half-eaten puffs, and pulled out the thing I’d thrown in that morning as an afterthought: a clear plastic water bottle I’d filled halfway with dyed rice and a handful of loose Cheerios, with the lid super-glued shut.
I’d seen the idea on a random mom forum a week before, and threw it together in 10 minutes while I was packing, just because I had all the supplies sitting on my kitchen counter. I almost left it at home, it felt too dumb, too cheap to be any good compared to the fancy branded toys I’d ordered. But Lila grabbed for it before I could even set it down, and immediately started shaking.
The soft rustle of the rice was barely loud enough to reach the person next to us, which was a relief. She turned it over slow, watching the Cheerios bob through the grains of rice, then rolled it back and forth across the tray table. She bit down on the smooth plastic side, then shook it as hard as she could, giggling when the grains shifted. Twenty minutes went by. The woman next to me opened her book again. I got to drink half my coffee while it was still warm. I sat there, surprised, and thought about all the time I’d spent stressing over packing the perfect travel toys.
I’ve worked as an early childhood aide for four years, so I know better than most how babies play. But when I was planning my first trip with Lila, I forgot all that, got sucked into the hype around special travel baby gear. The thing is, for babies between 6 and 12 months old, everything on a plane is already overstimulating. There’s the roar of the engines, the change in cabin pressure that makes their ears hurt, the weird movement of the plane, all the new people and smells. Fancy interactive toys that light up and play songs add even more stimulation, when what babies actually need when they’re overwhelmed is something low-key that lets them set the pace.
Open-ended play doesn’t come with a “right” way to play. Lila can shake her rice bottle hard if she’s wiggly and worked up, or hold it in her lap and just stare at the moving bits if she’s tired. She doesn’t have to figure out how to match a shape or press the right button to make it do something cool, which is just one more thing to get frustrated about when she can’t even crawl around to burn off energy. On top of that, the constant chewing and shaking helps equalize the pressure in her ears during takeoff and descent. I didn’t even plan for that, but on our first flight, when we were starting our descent, I braced for the screaming that I’d heard so much about, and Lila just kept chewing on the edge of the bottle and shaking it. No tears, no fuss. It worked better than a pacifier for her, because she could move around with it instead of just holding it in her mouth.
It’s so low-lift to make that I’m always shocked more people don’t do it. Grab a thick disposable water bottle, the kind that doesn’t bend easily. Add a drop of food coloring to a cup of white rice, shake it up in a plastic bag, spread it out to dry for an hour, that’s it. Fill the bottle about halfway, throw in a few big extra things that move slow—Cheerios, small pom poms, a couple of big buttons—then squeeze a layer of super glue around the edge of the lid and screw it on tight. Let it dry overnight before you leave, wrap it in a small plastic bag to keep it clean in your bag, and that’s the whole thing. It costs less than a dollar to make, takes 15 minutes of active time, fits in the side pocket of any diaper bag, and if you lose it, you don’t have to cry over a $25 toy.
It’s not a magic fix, of course. If Lila’s overtired and needs to nap, she still wants to be rocked and held, not play with a water bottle. If she’s teething badly, she’d rather have her cold silicone teether. I still pack one or two small extra toys just in case. But it’s the first thing I throw into my carry-on now when we travel, because it’s never let me down. What I didn’t expect when I threw that first bottle together was how much it would shift how I think about traveling with a baby. So much of the stress comes from feeling like we need to control every part of the experience, buy all the right gear to keep our babies happy and the other passengers happy. But on a plane, almost everything is out of a baby’s control: they can’t move around how they want, their ears hurt, everything is unfamiliar. Giving them one small, simple thing they can control—something that does exactly what they want it to, when they want it to—goes a lot further than any fancy toy ever could.
We’re flying to a family wedding next month, and I’m making a new bottle, this time adding a few pastel pom poms to the rice to see if Lila thinks that’s even more interesting. I still scroll the travel parenting posts sometimes, and I’ve bought a fancy toy or two since that first trip, but I know that if all else fails, I’ve got my cheap rice bottle in the bottom of the bag. It’s not cute, it doesn’t come in pretty packaging, and it doesn’t have thousands of five-star reviews on Amazon. But it’s my favorite baby toy for plane rides, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
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