Travel with Children - Booking child on a separate reward ticket

Hi all,
I am new to the whole reward ticket thing, but am certainly enjoying the possibilities. I am planning out a couple of trips in the next year and my preferred plan ends up a little complicated. I want to know if it is possible, and what I need to do in order to make it happen smoothly. We haven't done much flying since having the kids and what we have done has been pretty straight forward, so forgive me if these are basic questions.

First flight: We live in LAX area and will be taking trip to Hawaii on AA with 2 adults and 2 kids (age 3 and 1).

Second flight: Sometime later taking trip to Europe on AA with just 2 adults.

I know that AA allows a stopover when making a Europe reward flight, so I know it is possible to include the return leg of the Hawaii trip on our Europe trip (OGG-LAX; LAX-LHR for example), hence saving lots of miles. However, in order to take advantage of that we need to do 2 things: book our 3 year old a separate OGG-LAX ticket and include our 1 year old as a lap child for only the first part of the Europe flight (OGG-LAX). So, does anyone know are these 2 things possible with AA? If I call, would they be able to connect those separate tickets so it doesn't look like our 3 year old is flying alone? And, can you have a lap child for only one part of a flight?

Thanks for sharing your wisdom and experience!

I can't vouch for AA, but I've recently done most of this for some flights with SQ/NZ: booked reward tickets for the adults, and then paid for a separate infant ticket (10% of full fare) attached to the reward booking. So a round-trip following your full itinerary for either child should not be a problem.

The partial trip you suggest, though, is probably going to require a little more explaining. Give AA a ring, and if you don't like the first answer you get, hang up and try again...?

So you want to take two adults and two children to Hawaii, return to LAX and drop the kids off, then continue on to LHR?

I don't fly AA, so am curious. How many miles do you save doing this?

So you want to take two adults and two children to Hawaii, return to LAX and drop the kids off, then continue on to LHR?

I don't fly AA, so am curious. How many miles do you save doing this?

Yeah, that is correct.

If we fly coach, it would save at least 17.5k x 2 (35k) because the flight between Hawaii and LAX would be free since it would be considered a stopover. If we fly during peak season it would be 22.5k x 2 (45k) saved. The dates we are looking at is right on the edge of that season line so I am not sure which one it will be.

I book reward tickets on AA for my kids all the time while we are on seperate paid tickets. It's the way we fly 99% of the time. On the kids' booking on the type of passenger I select adult for one of the kids, otherwise it will not let you book an itinerary for two kids. In the secure flight info I enter their actual birthdates. Surprisingly there's no cross check between the passgenger type of adult/YA/child and the secure flight info. Then I book our paid ticket separately. That's it, I don't do anything else special besides picking seats near each other. Never been questioned at all on checkin.

In general would entering wrong birthyear in the reservation cause a problem? I would think that this can be easily corrected at airport checkin - it's not like it would require reticketing etc..