When we get a travel jones, my husband and I indulge. In our early married life, we dived the Cayman wall, danced at a German wedding, sampled rum and cigars in Cuba, raced our own small airplane across America.
And then, we had a baby.
I can hear you chuckling already. Most of my parenting friends did, too. They told me about what happens once you have kids — you forget about Mount Everest and start sending away for the Disney brochures. “We like to stay home,” they warned me. “Raising the kids is our top priority right now.” What they really mean is that traveling with small children is just an exercise in expensive damage control, and who has the stomach for it?
I did. I swore that this baby wasn’t going to wean us off our little junkets. I swore some more when we actually went on some of those trips. My intentions were noble but I came to realize, for example, that even a well-behaved 2-year-old will run screaming through the Uffizi after 35 minutes of staring at Titians. Later, instead of saying, “Thank goodness, Mommy, you’ve finally found the only vacant hotel room in all of Venice and now we can finally get some sleep,” this same 2-year-old will instead keep us all awake by screaming the A-B-C song well into the morning. If the aforementioned toddler is potty-training, she will always have to pee immediately after boarding a subway.
As you can appreciate, I’ve made my share of mistakes. I’ve been that desperate parent next to you on the flight, you know, the one wrestling the screaming child? The one you mutter to yourself about, “Can’t she just make that child STOP?” Yeah, I could, if I crammed a wad of the in-flight magazine into her mouth, but then the authorities would get a little too interested in my home life.
Instead, I learned to outsmart the screaming child. I learned that it is possible to take a vacation with small children, one that adults also enjoy, and I’m not talking Disney. I’m going to share my secrets with you, in hopes that more of us can take child-included vacations, thereby preserving our happiness and making us less likely to resent the little buggers and ruin their lives with constant refrains of “I always wanted to see the Acropolis. And then I had YOU.”
First, there’s no way around this one but it’s easier if you just have one kid. I’m not saying to limit yourself to one or you’ll never travel again. I’m just saying that you can take more adult-oriented vacations with only one child. See, you’re still working a properly weighted ratio: One adult can check out the Piet` while the other feeds Cheerios to the cranky toddler. With two kids, things get much tougher. As my sister with two sons in diapers says, “Traveling is awful. The routine with the kids is just like at home, but without all the useful equipment.” With three kids, you’re just not going to have an insanity-free trip. As my other sister said after delivering her third boy, “We’ve moved from a man-to-man into a zone defense.” If you can manage to take three children on a vacation without once longing to drive roofing nails into your forehead, you need to book yourself on Oprah right now and share your secret with the rest of the planet.
My second discovery was to work with the material you have. Crawling babies
who are into licking floors need to go somewhere clean. Preschoolers who
are in love with water want to go to shallow beaches. All kids need
frequent pit stops at big, empty, run-around-and-yell spots. Outdoors is
always good. Frequent changes in hotel rooms are not at all good. Come to think about it, frequent
changes in anything are not at all good.
So a sample day in Vienna with a 2-year-old could be arranged like this:
In the morning, when she’s at her best, go to Schoenbrunn. After
the palace tour, have a picnic lunch on the grounds, where she can run around.
Then it’s back to the hotel for a nap, when the shop-happy parent can slip out for some
errands and the non-shopper can read. After the nap, take a ride to nowhere on the
Ringstrasse trains and visit a coffeehouse for snacks. Then, stroll
through the streets and visit
a nearby playground, where you get to talk to some friendly locals. Next it’s on to
an early dinner before the toddler gets cranky, to the street
musicians for a quick dance, then back to the hotel for toddler bedtime and
dresser drinks for the parents.
Last and most important: Get help, get help, get help. Don’t believe your
friends and relatives when they say, “Oh, we’ll help you watch little
Hannah.” They have forgotten that “watching” is actually a grueling
triathlon of chasing, grabbing and herding, with an event change roughly
every 30 seconds. My mother, who promised to wake up with Lily at 6:30 a.m.
so that my husband and I could “sleep in,” finally roused herself at 8,
yawning, “I heard you, but I just couldn’t make myself get up.” One friend
of mine spent New Year’s Eve at her in-laws’ estate, holed up in her room
with a colicky baby. “We’ll help watch little Sam,” the in-laws had
promised, “you need to get away for a night.” But when the champagne hit
the flutes, they suddenly got a lot more interested in socializing than in
holding screamy little Sam.
No, family isn’t enough. What anyone traveling with a small child needs is
reliable help and plenty of it. I’m not talking an expensive nanny or hotel
sitter. Those
solutions work for an occasional dinner out, perhaps, and even then, you have to
schedule them, and worry about the quality of care, and the kids themselves are
stuck with a strange sitter in a strange hotel room instead of enjoying
what everyone came to see.
In Venice, we discovered that the answer is a kind of team travel. There,
we met up with another couple and headed for the Biennale art exhibit. They
offered to trade off Lily-duty and we accepted. Miraculously, we managed to
see most of the show while all four of us took turns chasing the
2-year-old through the pavilions. My husband and I were hooked. We
realized that it’s much better to haul along an entire other family. This
has the delightful effect of increasing the adult-to-child ratio. And if
the family has its own children, the bonus is that there are pals for
everyone. Team travel is even cost effective — everyone’s going the same place
together, so they all pay for themselves and nobody has to pay for sitters.
Last winter, in Bonaire, we booked some team travel and found true Child
Vacation Nirvana. We took along Lily’s best friend, his mom and dad and
their fabulous beach tent for a week of world-famous snorkeling and scuba
diving. It was bliss. In the mornings, my husband and I were on toddler
duty, hauling the kids and their tent off to a nice beach or taking them on
a long walk for ice cream. After nap time, Dylan’s parents took over while
my husband and I snorkeled, read, ate or, you know, vacationed. Every
night for dinner, one set of parents cooked in the condo for the kids while
the other set went out.
My husband and I got tans. We went snorkeling together. We ate out and
indulged in long, uninterrupted conversations. It reminded me of a friend’s
idea of creating pornography for new parents, which would consist of glossy
pictures of adults engrossed in really thick novels, eating messy chocolate desserts while reclining on white
couches, or enjoying a moment
of silence over after-dinner drinks in a quiet, dimly lit restaurant.
The kids got tans. They splashed at the beach. They ate huge amounts of
fish and bananas and read books to each other. Wherever we took the kids,
who are exactly the same age, we got the admiring attention normally
reserved for parents of twins.
So now, we don’t go anywhere without securing at least two other willing
adults, preferably with at least one child. Last fall, we stayed on the
Chesapeake with the aforementioned New Year’s Eve friends and their son.
This winter, we ate and biked our way through Key West with Dylan’s family. This fall, we’re braving the overseas flight again for another two weeks
in Europe with the Venice helpers.
So here’s my advice: Glom on to another family and start edging them toward
team travel. Flip through your address book right this minute and target
some likely candidates. Whether you’re hoping to see the pyramids or just
survive Disney, this is the way to go.
Usually I get about half an hour. Half an hour after takeoff in our small airplane before my 2-year-old starts wiggling around in her car seat, yelling, “Mommy! I want to fly too!”
Rounding up the kids for a ride in the family plane isn’t most people’s typical extra-curricular activity. Maybe you take the kids camping instead, or fishing or boating. But if your dad taught you how to fly, like mine did, you grow up with a speed jones and spend your weekends out at the airport. My hope was that my daughter, Lily, would take to flying like an older friend of hers, whose parents are also pilots. Amelia’s dad used to take her up in his aerobatic plane, and it was Amelia’s greatest thrill to command him, “Go upside down, Daddy!” These moments, when a little girl realizes she has the power to turn the world head over heels, are what shore up her self-confidence before the madness of peer pressure and girlish insecurity set in.
“Yay! An airplane ride!” Lily shouts. “The propeller is so big! I’m
going to fly the airplane with mommy and daddy! Can I get in now, please,
please, please?” That’s pretty much how I feel about flying, too, so
it’s great to have a companion who’s just as enthusiastic.
Half an hour into most short flights — when we’re stabilized at cruising altitude, flying straight-and-level and riding on autopilot — I unstrap Lily and let her climb up front on my lap. “You have to ask before you can touch anything,” I remind her. But she’s not easily distracted by shiny knobs and flashing lights. She knows where the action is on the one-ton hunk of metal mommy flies. Lily always heads straight for the “yoke,” the airplane’s steering wheel.
Lily loves to grab the yoke and roll it grandly from side to side — which is pretty laughable considering that even I struggle sometimes to hold the heavy
plane in steep turns. Lily’s tiny biceps don’t have much hope of moving that yoke past the small amount of play in the control cables. But that’s enough to spark grins of delight from my little starter pilot. “Look at me, I’m flying!” she squeals into the microphone on her junior headset.
After a brief hand at the controls, Lily is bundled safely in her car seat for most of the flight. There, she delights in unfolding and folding the giant aviation maps, yanking on her microphone and pointing out clouds. When we begin any flight, it’s Lily’s special job to holler “Clear!” — the standard warning before we crank the propeller.
Then she babbles like a tour guide during most of the flight, “See the
clouds? The houses are very small.” She’s become good at spotting other
airplanes, and once called out a distant airline jet before I saw it. Her
excitement is contagious. When I pull her in the front seat for an endless
stream of “What’s that?” and “Why?” answering her questions takes me back
10 years, to the thrill of my early days of flying. Plus, she’s killer
cute in her little headset and flight suit, and when she grabs the yoke, we
can’t take enough snapshots.
Taking Lily along has made for some interesting situations that they didn’t teach me about in flight school. Diaper changes, for example, have to be fast because the best position is to drape the baby across the pilot’s and co-pilot’s laps. Also, it’s best to make a note in your flight plan, “baby on board.” That way, air traffic controllers are wise to the occasional background wailing while you’re chatting with them on the radio.
And you can never have too many wipes or Ziploc bags. After all, you can’t pull over to empty the trash. And you can’t open the windows in flight to air the plane out. The seat pockets in our plane used to hold maps, wrenches and flight checklists. Now they’re stuffed with snacks, crayons and slightly crumpled Kleenex.
We’ve had our share of unexpected developments. I can’t really blame Lily for the one time she got airsick. It was a windy afternoon and I was sliding and skidding the plane all over the place, trying to hold to a particular angle of descent to land at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. First Lily screamed, which was pretty disconcerting. Then she barfed. Fortunately, I was the one flying, which left my husband on nurse duty. But somehow, I ended up with the raunchy car seat in the airport, which hardly fit my macho self-image. Can you see Amelia Earhart huddled in an airport ladies’ room, furtively rinsing vomit from a flowered velour seat cover? Hardly.
Like most glamorous adult activities, flying loses some of its thrill when a small child is involved. Before Lily, my husband and I used to wake up in the morning, stretch and say, “Hey, let’s fly out to the beach and go for a swim.” Now, our life isn’t quite that decadent. There are diapers and juice boxes to be packed, a big plastic car seat to be wrestled, a fussy toddler to be soothed. Out at the airport, one pilot checks and prepares the plane while the other corrals the child to keep her from dashing out onto the runway.
Things get more complicated in mid-air, where my husband and I swap pilot and co-pilot duties. In our glamour days, the pilot flew the plane and
the co-pilot navigated. But there are a few extra cockpit distractions with a child, particularly when diapers are involved. So now the pilot flies the plane and the co-pilot entertains and cleans the passenger.
And yet, I’ll never give up our family flights. When I see Lily yanking that yoke around and chattering into the intercom, I realize how limitless the world of a 2-year-old girl is. She doesn’t know that only 6 percent of pilots are women. All she knows is that flying is really, really fun. And she can do it.
I‘m in love with my day-care center. Yeah, I know that’s pretty drastic
but before you tell me I’m some kind of unnatural mother, hear me out.
Lily’s been going there ever since she was 4 months old, over two
years now. She began going because my husband earns too much money to
quit and stay home, and I like my job too much to quit and stay home. So
the whole thing did start so that we could both work. But what I’ve
slowly realized during these past two and a half years is that I need
that day-care center for much more than keeping Lily safe and entertained
three days a week. I need it to help me raise her. The men and women
working there are her playmates, extended family, informal pediatricians
and child psychologists.
We live alone. What I mean is that my mini-family is stuck up here in
Boston, far from in-laws in the Midwest and generations of my family in
the Southeast. Sure, we have friends, but no doting grandparents ready
to offer advice or dandle the baby while Bill and I share some rare and
valuable face time. When Lily started at the center, that all changed.
Suddenly we had not only baby-sitting but a coterie of experienced
advisors.
I was relieved, because shortly after Lily was born I realized that my
friends with children were completely clueless about newborns. They had
already forgotten the minutiae of pablum textures, latch-on, growth
spurts and poop colors. As their kids grow older, parents apparently
brain-dump all previous information on, say, early walking, to make room
for the new stuff on Hanson and Tamagotchi.
My mother’s group was a better resource because the kids were all born
in the same month. But there were only six of us, so the information
pool was pretty limited. At the day-care center, however, were Anne and
Lucy — professionals who had cared for hundreds of children. For me, their
information pool was an ocean.
For example, when I started struggling with solid foods, Anne suggested
mixing the tasteless cereal with juice when I ran out of expressed milk.
When Lily stopped lying quietly for a new diaper, Anne showed me how to
do a diaper change while a wriggly toddler is standing up. From
watching the young toddler room, I learned that any transition goes more
smoothly if you make up a goofy song to move things along, like, “It’s
time for that/coat and hat/bundle up/to go for a walk! Yay!”
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
When I found a red dot on 16-month-old Lily’s belly, it was my day-care
center I headed to, not my pediatrician. Chicken pox was “going around,”
and we’d already had one false alarm. My pediatrician doesn’t like to
see those highly contagious kids in her office, so her diagnosis was,
“If she develops more spots and they itch, then it’s chicken pox.” Since we were throwing a party the next evening, I needed to know whether I had a contagious
kid. Kathy, the day-care center director, stepped out of her office to do
a quick confirmation in the hallway. She even told me how long the pox was
going to last and what kind of calamine lotion to buy.
My pediatrician tells me that even if Lily weren’t in day care, she’d be
catching all of these viruses eventually until she builds up her immunity.
Fortunately, the place where she’s catching them is also the place where
lots of other kids are catching the same things. Now, for any illness, I
call my day-care center first. “Yeah, that’s going around,” Kathy will
often say. “It starts with a high fever, then maybe some vomiting. It
lasts for about five days. We’ve got eight kids out now with it.” Even
my pediatrician can’t give me information that specific.
I keep Lily home four days a week. But even if I were with her seven, I
wouldn’t know as much about her as I’ve learned from talking to her
day-care providers. She’s my only child and few of my friends are
parents, so I don’t have much context to work with. But watching her
play at day care, meeting her little pals and talking to the teachers
clues me in to Lily’s social and learning styles. When I recently
started talking to pre-school directors, I could spout some convincing
child-development-speak, such as, “she transitions well, interacts best in
smaller groups and is very aware of her surroundings.”
If I kept her home for seven days a week, not only would I be crabby and
professionally unfulfilled, but I doubt I’d come up with as much
kid entertainment as the day care does. Every day in their huge
play-space they make wonderful messes. One rainy day they made “mud”
with cocoa powder, water and salt. They make “goop” with cornstarch and
water, a miracle mixture that dries to an easily vacuumed dust. I know
that babies and young toddlers learn a lot through touch, but I just
can’t bring myself to spread paint out on the kitchen floor for her to
walk in. Or to let her smear colored whipped cream in her hair. I do
manage to come up with a few play ideas, most of them sparked by looking
around her schoolroom and studying what toddlers like to do.
Those things I’ve learned about Lily are all important. But here’s the
real jewel in the crown for me: I don’t have much patience, and I’m
eternally thankful for the three days a week that Lily and I have apart.
On Monday night, I happily anticipate packing her off to “school” on
Tuesday morning — three whole days of going to the bathroom alone! Three
days of working on projects that I can control and complete! Three days
of uninterrupted phone conversations with other adults!
And then by Thursday night, I’m looking forward to spending Friday
helping her make Play-Doh cookies or reading a new Babybug magazine. The
time away refreshes me so that with her, I can be more patient, more
reliable and more fun. And I’m not the only one who needs the break — my
husband and I spent 10 years together before we had the baby, and we
still need time alone with each other. Several of our day-care providers
moonlight, so we’ve never had to scramble for a reliable sitter, even
when we’ve started calling around only a few days in advance. Whenever
I’ve had a particularly busy work week, the center has cheerfully taken
Lily for a few extra days.
Don’t get me wrong. There are a few flies in the ointment. When there
was no space in the older-kid rooms, Lily was held back with smaller
kids longer than she should have been. And when she was about 18 months
old, we had The Potty Incident. At home, she had started using her beloved
potty several times a day, staying dry and clean fairly often. She
probably would have potty-trained in a week or two — if the day-care center
could have helped. But their child/teacher ratios didn’t allow for
someone to take Lily to the bathroom very often. She quickly lost
interest and is back in diapers, even at home. But I know that the potty
thing is only a matter of time, so I’ll gladly trade a few poopy diapers
for everything else I’ve gotten.
The full weight of what day care does for our little family hit home last
fall, when we spent two weeks in Europe. After three or four days of
chasing Lily through Venetian cafes, sharing a small hotel room and
gazing longingly into charming little shops filled with delicate blown
glass, I’d had enough of the “vacation.” Travel-weary Lily quickly
turned into Velcro Baby and talked constantly about her day-care pals.
Trapped in the hotel room during her naps, I managed to scribble a
scarce few postcards. The first one I sent was to our day-care center. It
said, “We miss you, can’t wait to get back.”
