Vegas, Baby, Vegas! What To Do with a Baby in Vegas

I love Vegas.

It can be tacky, excessive, and expensive, yes. But Vegas can also be SO much fun.

This is a fact: Hawai'i people LOVE Vegas. Yes, there is the rare exception to the rule. But for the most part, they

Like countless other islanders, my family and friends have celebrated weddings, engagements, birthdays, and even Thanksgivings in Vegas. We even asked our wedding photographer, the world-famous and somehow even-more-wonderful-in-person Jasmine Star, to shoot some engagement photos of us in Vegas a few months before the wedding.

I hadn't been back to Vegas since before I got pregnant, so I was itching to go. My mom and grandma agreed to come along to help watch the baby, so we were all set.

Except: we've been to Vegas dozens of times, but we've never been to Vegas with a baby.

I immediately googled “what to do in Vegas with a baby,” but nearly all of the search results were about slightly older children, not babies.

Learn from our experience. If you have to bring a baby to Vegas, this is what to do.

1. Book a smoke free hotel room

There aren't a lot of smoke-free hotel options in Vegas, but there are some. The Mandarin Oriental, Four Seasons, Vdara, and Signature at MGM Grand are all smoke-free (and gaming-free), so you can walk around the hotel grounds without having to worry about your baby breathing in secondhand smoke. This would have been my first choice, but my grandma wanted to stay in downtown Las Vegas because that’s where she’s comfortable, and I wanted to stay near her and my mom, so we ended up booking the Rush Tower at the Golden Nugget. It was fine, a little dark if anything and nothing memorable. It’s fine for downtown.

2. Rent a Car

And while we're on the subject of bookings -- you should probably rent a car. In our pre-baby days, we would have just used a Lyft or Uber to get around, but now we are all about the mini-vans! Suitcases full of baby gear, plus her carseat, stroller, and travel crib . . . the list of gear is endless, and having a mini-van (or at least a car) makes it much easier to get around with a baby.

3. Plan to Play (and Read) in Your Hotel Room 

You’ll want to keep baby out of the smoke indoors and the heat outside, so plan to spend a lot of time relaxing in your hotel room. Bring toys for baby to play with and a different board books to read. You could also ship toys to the hotel ahead of time if they’re cheap toys that can just be donated to the hotel afterward.

My daughter is discovering the joys of noisemaking and music, so we brought along a bunch of toys from her Innocheer musical instrument set, and her Baby Einstein Take Along Tunes musical toy, and her Crate and Kids Sesame Street Carry Home Brownstone. The brownstone is the cutest thing ever — a soft, portable “dollhouse” featuring Elmo and the gang. She loves playing hide and seek with the characters and opening and closing all the velcro flaps.

If your baby still spends a lot of time crawling, I’d recommend that you bring a travel crib that they can hang out in. We didn't want her crawling around on the dirty Vegas floor, so we brought our Nuna Sena crib. It’s the big size, not the travel size, so it doubles as a playpen and a crib for sleeping.

4. Make Eating Out a Family Affair

Being in Vegas is not a good time to be on a diet. It is a time to splurge and eat to excess and then have champagne while you play craps. The baby came with us to Bouchon (my perpetual brunch/lunch favorite) and to the Oyster Bar and Grotto. I seriously must have gained five pounds on the trip (I don't have a scale so I don't actually know) but it was so worth it.

Tip for infants: bring an Inglesina Fast high chair. They can sit in there from pretty small and it is seriously the best thing ever! Phil & Teds makes a similar high chair, too -- the lobster chair, but I haven’t tried it so I can’t vouch for it.

5. Go Shopping

There is so much fun shopping in Vegas -- Fashion Show Mall, Miracle Mile, Crystals all have lots of stores in which to spend your your cash (or at least stop losing it!), and it’s a good way to get out of the smoky air for awhile.

6. Visit the Strip

If the weather isn't crazy hot or cold when you visit, visit the strip! You can "oooh" over the Bellagio fountain show and smile at the dolphins at the Mirage. My daughter loves fish (she excitedly and adorably calls them "ish! ish!") and I think she would have loved the aquarium at Mandalay Bay if we'd had time.

But really- your baby will be happy wherever, as long as he or she is with you!