The Little Giraffe Who Taught Kids That Brave Just Means You Try
There is something about an airport that turns even the most easygoing toddler into a different creature entirely.
The scale of it. The noise. The rivers of strangers moving in every direction with absolute certainty about where they are going. To a three-year-old standing in the middle of all of it, the world has suddenly gotten very, very large.
And that is before the plane even enters the picture.
Tavi the Travelling Giraffe Goes on the Plane knows that feeling intimately. And it meets children right there inside it, not to talk them out of it, but to walk straight through it with them.
Follow the Leaf
Tavi is a young giraffe with one very important possession. Her comfort leaf. The thing she carries everywhere, the object that makes unfamiliar places feel a little more like home.
Somewhere in the beautiful chaos of her first journey, the leaf takes flight on its own.
Now Tavi has a choice. Stay safely behind where everything is known. Or follow.
She follows.
What happens next is not a story about a giraffe who stops being scared. It is a story about a giraffe who is scared and goes anyway. Through the rush of a busy terminal. Through the strangeness of a tiny plane seat. Through sounds that feel too big and moments that feel too new. Tavi breathes. She accepts help. She finds that the things that make her feel like herself, her routines, her rituals, her own steadiness, travel with her even when her comfort leaf does not.
By the time she lands, she has not lost her nervousness. She has simply discovered she is larger than it.
Where This Story Came From
Alexandra Wagenhoffer has spent more than a decade living exactly the life that inspired this book.
Based in North West London, she works as a certified Baby and Toddler Sleep Consultant and travel nanny, accompanying ultra-high-net-worth families across time zones, continents, and every variety of travel disruption imaginable. She holds an OCN Level 6 certification in Pediatric Sleep from the London School of Childcare Studies. She has seen firsthand, in Kenyan game parks and European hotel rooms and transatlantic cabins, what happens when young children are asked to be brave in places that feel nothing like home.
What she noticed every time was not that children could not handle it. It was that they needed a bridge.
Something that said: this new place can be as safe as home. Same you. Same routines. Different view out the window.
Tavi is that bridge.
The One Line That Says Everything
Wagenhoffer offers families a single piece of advice that quietly holds the entire book together.
“Before you fix the sleep, the routine, or the behaviour, come back to calm. Your child borrows your nervous system.”
That is worth reading twice before your next trip.
Because what Tavi ultimately offers children, it offers parents too. A reminder that the most powerful thing you can pack is your own steadiness. Everything else, the snacks, the tablets, the carefully curated carry-on activities, comes second to that.
Read It Before You Go
The best time to read Tavi the Travelling Giraffe is not at the gate. It is in the weeks before departure, tucked into the ordinary bedtime routine, when your child is calm and the trip still feels like something exciting on the horizon rather than something overwhelming happening right now.
Let Tavi’s journey become familiar before the airport does. Talk about what Tavi found hard. Ask your child what their own comfort leaf would be. What is the thing they want to bring that makes everywhere feel a little more like home.
Then on travel day, when the big feelings show up right on schedule, you already have a shared language for it.
You have been there before. You went with Tavi.
Book Details
Title: Tavi the Travelling Giraffe Goes On the Plane
Author: Alexandra Wagenhoffer
Publisher: Empath Kids
Publication Date: February 17, 2026
Recommended Ages: 3–6
📖 Get your copy on Amazon
🌐 Visit The Travel Sleep Nanny
📱 Follow Alexandra on Instagram
