When we thought about booking our trip to the Italian Lakes, we couldn't decide between Como or Garda, so decided to visit them both! By flying into Milan, you could connect easily by train to visit them and Como is just over an hour's train ride outside of Milan towards the Swiss alps. In fact, if you stay on the train, the next stop is in Switzerland!

Oh Lake Garda. HOW did I not know about this dreamy place before? For all the times that we've travelled to, and loved, Italy, neither Ben or I had any idea how gorgeous Lake Garda would be. I had in my head somehow that it was for old people on coach trips? But then, this summer a friend visited and combined it with Venice & Verona, and I saw her photos and was convinced in an instant knowing that one day I wanted to visit. In August, we decided to book a last minute trip away for September - Freya's first trip at just 8 weeks old - and were going through so many potential destinations in our head. The key things being that we wanted nice places to walk with a buggy, by the water {but not a beachy trip}, with good food and old towns to wander around. We didn't want to have to hire a car, the whole carseat thing being a faff when she's so small {and doesn't really love the car as it is back in England} and not too expensive. We thought about Porto, we thought and nearly booked the Ile de Re, but then we discovered Lake Garda and it was JUST what we were looking for with so, so much more. So here's a mini travelogue of our stay, I'll mainly let the photos do the talking as ever but lots of details about what to do/how to get there etc. 

I've blinked and we're almost 11 weeks into this parenting journey already. I still don't know where to really begin with blogging everything from these past couple of months and the things I want to have documented on here. As you can imagine, there's rarely a spare moment these days. BUT I do so want to have these precious photos from when Freya was just five days old.

I’m not pretending to be an expert on travelling with a baby by any means {all babies are so different plus babies at different ages will bring new challenges} but we just got back from 9 days in Italy, and our first flight return trip with 2 month old baby Freya and this is the kind of post I wanted to read when we were planning our trip. We had no idea before what allowances you had for baggage with an infant ticket for example, and it seems some of you on Instagram feel the same - I had SO many requests for this post. So here’s what we packed, and some tips we picked up along the way;

this post contains some affiliate links.

We took our first little minibreak as a family of 3 last week... 

this post is sponsored by Lansinoh.