I made one small change while traveling with my kids. It cost $150 but was worth every penny — and I wish I'd done it sooner.

A parent shares her perspective on the difficulties of traveling with baby gear and the ease of renting equipment instead.

• I travel regularly with my two kids, which requires a lot of stuff.
• Until this month, I always brought our own car seats and Pack 'n Play crib.
• This time, I rented car seats and a crib. I paid $150 extra but the change made travel much easier.

My husband and I started traveling with my first daughter when she was only 6 months old. We began with local road trips and later flew cross-country to Hawaii and Mexico.

We would always haul our car seat and Pack 'n Play alongside numerous suitcases and carry-on bags. It was a lot, but I preferred having our own stuff.

But when my second daughter was born in 2023, it quickly became clear that this strategy no longer served us. We were massively outnumbered by bags to people.

So when it was time to take another family trip this past December, I ditched our car seats and Pack 'n Play. It was a game changer for us as parents.

Even though renting seats costs extra, I'll never bring these items again.

Previously, I thought it would be easiest and safest to bring our own gear

As a nervous first-time parent, I initially shot down the idea of renting car seats.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says to replace a child's car seat anytime it is involved in a moderate to severe car crash. However, according to Safe Ride 4 Kids, there is no way to inspect a car seat after a crash to determine the severity of damage. The safest thing you can do is throw it away.

This made me anxious. What if someone rented a car with seats and got into a scuffle deemed minor, but damage occurred, I wondered.

For this reason, we always brought our own — plus, car seats are always free to check in with airlines so it seemed like a waste of money to rent them.

We purchased a second, lighter 10-pound travel seat for travel for my toddler instead of her 30-pound Britax Boulevard seat that had already cost us $350.

I also thought it was more reliable to bring our own Pack 'n Play after encountering hotels with heavily-used models in rough shape, and one instance where they were all in use by other guests.

But then we had a second baby and took our first trip as a family of four. We flew from Palm Springs, California, to Denver, Colorado, when my baby was two months old.

Still in an infant seat, we brought her Uppababy Mesa with its required base, a collective 20 pounds. We also had my toddler's travel car seat, a Pack 'n Play, three full-size suitcases, two diaper bags, two carry-on bags, and a travel stroller.

I'm still not sure how we all made it from the curb to the check-in desk.

I do, however, have vivid memories of schlepping it all off a car rental shuttle bus at the airport — thank you, sympathetic strangers who helped us — then across two lanes of traffic, into an elevator, and across the terminal while wrangling a toddler and infant. Tears were involved, and not just from my children.

Knowing we had a family trip to Orlando six months later, we vowed to do things differently for our collective sanity.

Packing lighter removed so much stress

As our Orlando trip neared, I couldn't stop thinking about all the stuff we had to bring.

Perhaps more at ease as a second-time parent, I decided it was very unlikely a rental car agency would ever allow a crash to go undetected. I rebooked our rental to include one infant car seat and one toddler seat when we picked up the car for an extra $156.

We also left the Pack 'n Play behind. We'd previously been able to use Pack 'n Plays at hotels closer to home without an issue, on trips to Huntington Beach and Coronado, San Diego. And before we arrived in Orlando, I requested a Pack 'n Play at each of our two hotels ahead of time. Considering we were visiting the very family-friendly Walt Disney World area, I wasn't too worried about availability.

When we landed in Orlando, our car rental agency had two seats waiting for us wrapped in plastic. While they felt cheaper and less sturdy than ours at home, they did the job.

There was no problem at each of our hotels with the Pack 'n Play either, and we brought our own sheet to make it more familiar for our baby.

While we still had a lot to lug between suitcases, carry-ons, and a stroller, removing our heaviest, bulkiest baggage made a huge difference.

It was such a simple change, I can't believe we didn't do it sooner.