All the Time In the World

While there are countless benefits associated with traveling, one thing that it offers families is the chance to experience the world in an entirely different way. For so many, life is overflowing with jobs, school, meetings, activities, and countless other events. The typical 21st century family often has so little time together that they can go a full week without seeing everyone in the same room at the same time. When you travel, though, the clock stops on regular life and you are afforded the chance to spend real time with your family and, indeed, yourself.

Traveling with a child is a much different experience than traveling with other adults. Children experience the world head on, always questioning and examining…always learning. When you travel with your child, especially a young child, you are forced to do the same because at any given moment, you are their teacher. They are looking to you to lead them through their own discoveries and thus, you too have to learn about the places you are traveling to. Children teach us to learn rather than to simply look. They constantly ask the questions that we have forgotten how to ask. What is that? Who made it? Why did they make it? Where are we? Why is this place important? In daily life, a child’s questioning nature can be taxing, but when you are both seeing a place together for the very first time, they become the experts at truly experiencing a place.

Unlike adults, children live in a world that has no real schedules or commitments. They are only limited by their own seemingly boundless energy. They put so much energy into being in the moment and enjoying that moment to its fullest. As adults we are so accustomed to going, going, going that we often forget this part of life. We must plan our time down to the minute and make sure we fit in everything we are expected to do. Travel with children, however, is the exact opposite. Yes, you will make plans, but only half of them may get done in any given day. They are too busy enjoying themselves to be troubled by an itinerary. At first it’s maddening because it goes against everything we are accustomed to. Slowly, though, we learn that we too need to stop and enjoy ourselves just as they are. By embracing the child’s way of discovering the world, we experience more than we ever would have if we had stuck to our meticulously planned trip. Traveling is indeed a wonderful cultural experience that everyone should take part in. Traveling with a child, though, opens your eyes to not only their own wonderful personalities and ways of learning, but also to the person you used to be before you grew up.

Sleepy Head

I have a challenge for you. Pick up 30 pounds worth of weights and carry them in your arms for a mile. You can rest if you need to, but you can't lay the weights down. OK, ready? Go! Why aren't you moving? Seriously, let's go. Why are you looking at me like I'm crazy? I've done this before so that means you can too. Go, go, go!

You still think I'm crazy don't you? OK, I'll admit it, this whole challenge is crazy, but it's not out of the realm of possibility when you are traveling with a child. One thing I think all parents are aware of is the fact that kids' schedules never seem to mesh with ours. This fact extends to sleeping as well. It's pretty much a guarantee that at some point, especially on long trips where you are sightseeing a lot, your child is going to fall totally and completely asleep at the most inopportune time (walking tours seem to be a favorite for Maya). Now you may think "Well that doesn't really matter. Surely you travel with a stroller." Well...actually, I don't. As inconceivable as that sounds, Josh and I have found that strollers cause more problems and hassles than solve them. Thus, we never travel with them. (If you don't believe me, try navigating the subway in Spain or any other city with an old transportation system. Steps and strollers don't work well.) The drawback to this, of course, is that when your child is so asleep that they are flopping around like a rag doll full of lead pellets, someone's got to carry them no matter how far the walk is.

Case in point: When we were in Budapest last year we spent one afternoon at Palatinus Beach on Margaret Island which is an island in the middle of the Danube River. It was roughly two miles from our hotel. After Maya and I played in the pool for a couple hours and then played at one of Budapest's gazillion playgrounds, we decided to head back. Everything was fine...until Maya fell asleep. Dead asleep. We took turns carrying her but we had to keep going as we wanted to try to make it back to the hotel because it was starting to rain. It was the longest two miles of my life.

Really, your options when they get to the dreaded "dead to the world" stage are pretty limited. If you can't stop, you just have to keep trucking along. For smaller children, this is when a fabric baby sling is invaluable. For older children, you can try taking turns carrying them or putting them on your shoulders. Most of the time, though, Josh and I will take the opportunity to stop into a small cafe or restaurant and have a small leisurely meal while she sleeps. Honestly, if you can't do anything of touristic value because your little one is zonked out, you may as well enjoy yourself! Cappuccino, anyone?

Excitement

I'm very excited today because we just reserved our tickets to China for next summer! So far, the plan is to spend a week in Beijing and then a week in Xian and the outlying Xian area. It's a bit off as the trip is early summer, but it will be the longest trip we've had since our honeymoon and to someplace just as cool.

I can't wait to take Maya there. I think she's going to love it. There's so much history there and I know it's going to be sensory overload for all of us. I just hope Josh doesn't try to bribe me into eating anything REALLY ethnic like scorpions or grasshoppers. The closest thing we've had to real chinese is eating Moo Shi Pork from the take out place down the street and I doubt that even that is authentic Chinese food. I may be in for it, though, because I do not like fish at all and I know they eat a lot of it there. Maybe I'll just live on noodles and steamed dumplings.

Remembrance

I was planning to write a blog yesterday complaining about how our flight from Chicago was delayed on Monday night but, as we were taking the bus to our car at 1:30 am, I saw the date scrolling on the bus’ electronic ticker. September 11th change so many things for us as Americans, but most especially our views on traveling. Traveling for fun became viewed almost as an unnecessary risk by many though, obviously, not by us.

The first trip we had planned after then just so happened to be two and a half weeks later…to New York City. As with most of our trips, we had planned it months beforehand and had expensive show tickets to a show we really wanted to see. After some great thought as to if we should go, and even whether or not it would be disrespectful to go, we decided to continue with our trip. Driving there was odd. There was a lot of traffic and we got stuck on the ramp into the Lincoln Tunnel. From that vantage point you could see lower Manhattan with smoke still billowing out from between the buildings. We had taken a trip about two weeks before September 11th to New York and had decided on that trip to skip out on seeing the World Trade Center because we knew we were coming back. That fact made them not being there all the more poignant.

Being in New York so soon after was a profound experience that has now been burned into my memory. We rode the subway as far as we could into lower Manhattan and then walked the rest of the way through dreary rain. We weren’t going there so we could say “We were there,” we were going more so we could pay our respects. Seeing the wreckage and the hundreds of flyers with the names and faces of the missing is still something I’m not fully capable of describing. Indeed, to this day, I have a very hard time going there or even watching footage from that day. Later that day we went to our show, a wonderful musical comedy that we had seen several times before. It was a desperately needed laugh and it really kind of let us feel some sense of normalcy, even if only for a few hours.

It wasn’t until 2003, when Maya was born, that we really started traveling a lot. I think, for us, we wanted to in part because of 9/11. Rather than allowing the actions of a few make us fearful of the world, we chose to seek it out so we could understand and respect the many different countries and cultures out there. Now, we view travel not as a way to boast about where we’ve been, but as a way to better ourselves and hopefully our child. We have made many friends around the world and have been places I never would have dreamed of going to. I can only hope that others will someday follow our lead and discover the wonderful places and people our small world has to offer them.

Hooligans in Training

Well, yesterday was the big soccer match. I'll leave out my personal feelings about our performance on the field, but everyone still managed to have a great time despite losing 4-2.

The day started with a quest to find face paint. One thing you may eventually learn about me is that I never miss a chance to be goofy, especially if I can do it with Maya. After Jen and I woke up, we left Maya with the guys and headed out to try to find some red, white, and blue face paints. We figured since it's close to Haloween that it would be no problem and we'd be in and out. Three stores and an hour and a half later, however, we finally were on our way home. We didn't have too much time once we got back so I had to do the face painting on the run and ended up doing Maya's once we got to the match. Since we never had the chance to get Maya's face painted at Disneyland (which she wanted to have done really badly), I decided to go all out and paint a big red, white, and blue butterfly on her face complete with glitter. I couldn't pass up the chance to paint my own face, though, and adorned myself with a giant red star and the letters USA on one cheek.

I'm quite, well, passionate at soccer matches so I was pretty into it. Maya however, isn't always so excited and soon was sucking her thumb and nodding off. She's actually got a good streak of falling asleep at important soccer matches and eventually was snoozing away even as I yelled and screamed at the top of my lungs. Oh well, she really only missed out on an own goal, a couple yellow cards, and some pretty fantastic acting on the field (a Brazilian player was actually carded for diving...classic!). Ahhh, I do so love soccer.

Not So Short and Sweet

One may think that shorter trips are easier on kids, but I've actually found the opposite to be true many time. I think the reasons for this are because you tend to be on the go much more since you are trying to maximize your short time at your destination and also because there is little time between travel days. Many times, Maya's behavior is actually wore on trips like the one we are on now and it can make for some pretty long days (mentally at least).

Saturday, our first full day in Chicago, was a tough day for her in terms of her behavior. It all started when she woke up at, what felt like, the crack of dawn. This meant that I, too, had to wake up at the crack of dawn. Considering the fact that she had not gone to bed until about 11:30 our time the night before, this set thing up for a very, very long day of whining, crying, running away, and basic unruliness. It all came to a head when we were in the beautiful Baha'i House of Worship for the North American Continent in Wilmette, Illinois.

Josh had been to the Baha'i temple in India while on a graduate school trip earlier this year so, when he found out that there was one in the Chicago area, he really wanted to go see it. The temple is a gorgeous intricately carved white stone building with well kept gardens in a quiet serene setting. Maya, in keeping with the India meaning of her name which is chaos, was anything but quiet and serene. Eventually, while we were in the midst of listening to one of the tour guides tell us about the other Baha'i temples around the world, I had to actually take her outside and give her a time out right there on the front steps of the temple. Not exactly a fun way to spend an afternoon. She was pretty mopey and whiny the rest of the day, but quickly fell asleep when I finally got her to bed later that night. It will probably come as no surprise that she slept in until 8:45 the next morning.

Quicksilver

It may be hard to believe, but our family is on the road again! Every now and then, Josh and I plan trips that most people think are, well, ridiculous. This weekend's trip would be one of those. A while back, we found out that the U.S. National Soccer team would be playing the Brazilian National Soccer team at Soldier Field in Chicago, Illinois. Being the crazy soccer fans we are, we called up our close friends in Chicago who are also big soccer fans and made plans to come out and support our team.

The trip out was pretty good, though we kept getting threatened with delays. First they said we would be delayed an hour, then 30 minutes, then they boarded us. When we got on the plane, it turns out we were actually suppose to be delayed an hour and a half from our original departure time and that air traffic control had been telling us the wrong times! Our pilot seemed pretty steamed as he was relaying all this to us in the cabin and finally came on and said he had basically shamed traffic control into letting us take off. Once we were up in the air, Maya played with her princess sticker book and colored in her new Trunki passport. We got Trixie quite a while ago, before the good people at Trunki had developed the passport that comes with the new ones, and they were nice enough to send us one to use for our travels. Maya loves it! She had a great time coloring in all the pages and asking about all the pictures...that is, until she drew a great big green line on the back of my nice white shirt with crayon! They had to be put away after that one.

While we were flying, we were also treated to a beautiful lighting show. We were far enough away from it that it didn't cause too much turbulence but it was still fun to watch. I think making something like that, that can easily be kind of scary for a kid, into something fun and exciting is a good way to handle it. Then, rather than seeing it as something to fear, they look at it almost as a game. Much like with the waves in La Jolla, we had a great time trying to guess when the next bit of lightning would flash in the clouds and how big it would be. It really was a beautiful sight and a fun way to pass the time.

You Have to Start Somewhere

People often ask me when I got so hooked on traveling, especially when they see that I'm still going all over with a child in tow. It really started with my honeymoon seven years ago. Until my wedding, I had never really been out of the country. Oh, I had gone to the Bahamas, but it was a pretty canned experience and it didn't feel very different from any other beach in the U.S. When we got married, however, Josh and I shocked everyone we knew by choosing to honeymoon in Luxor and Cairo, Egypt. Looking back on it, it was probably a crazy thing to do as neither of us had ever been out of the country on our own, we couldn't read or speak Arabic, and we pretty much had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. It still reigns as my favorite trip.

Going to Egypt taught me that experiencing the unknown, and even embracing it, isn't always a bad thing. I think it's the fear of the unknown that keeps a lot of parents from believing that traveling with children is possible. What if they don't do well on the plane or in the car? What if it's really different when we get there? What if we can't find a place to eat with food they like? And, as if all the questions and apprehensions parents may have just on their own weren't enough, there's also no shortage of websites and news articles sharing stories of how horrible it is being around small children while on travel. My advice: don't believe everything you read and hear and don't give up if your first experience is a bad one. True, it's not always sunshine and roses. We've had really good experiences and really bad experiences in our many travels, but traveling, be it to great grandmas or Great Britain, can become a truly rewarding part of your life if you allow yourself to just let go and experience it as it happens. In reality, traveling with a child is much like eating vegetables when you're a kid. Yes it's different and everyone has their horror stories, but, really, you won't know if you (or your child) will like it until you try it. Who knows, maybe you'll be the kid who loves brussel sprouts.