How to do a night flight with 3yo and 1yo? Tips wanted please!

[TuttiFrutti]

We have a 5am flight with our ds who is just 3 and our dd, 14 months. It's not a long flight (4 hours) but we have to be at the airport at 3am!

The bits I'm dreading are the 2 hour wait between check-in and boarding, and the flight itself. Has anyone done this before and do you have any tips on how to make the whole experience less hellish?

PS Let's hope the holiday is really good to make it all worth it!

Make it into an adventure, try to put them to bed early the night before so that they get a good sleep and are less likely to be grumpy when you wake them. Take some games and toys with you and some blankets and pillows in case they want to sleep at the airport. don't really know what else to suggest really.

You just have to grin and bear it.Assume it will be shit and if it isn't then you will be pleasantly surprised.

Put them to bed in their clothes the night before and don't wake them up until the last moment before leaving. Are you taking a buggy? Does it lie right back? They may fall asleep again whilst being pushed around the airport [hopeful emoticon].

Sorry...I haven't done an early flight so that's all I can think of.

Thanks for all the tips - particularly liked Moondog's one about it just being basically shit.

What's extra hard is thinking what to pack in our very restrictive hand luggage, seeing as we need enough nappies for 24 hours for 2 children (ds not yet potty trained), wipes, change of clothes for each child, snacks, some sort of books/entertainment... We will have no space left for our passports and tickets, never mind anything for ourselves.

I think the children will have a hand luggage allowance - we took ds to Lanzarote last week with first choice and he did - we were able to put his stuff in his own bag. We had to be at the airport for 6, just got up as normal (although 3 hours earlier), once a the airport had some breakfast, looked around etc, by the time we were on the plane ds flaked out.