Traveling with kids

When Nick and I first had kids, we were under the innocent impression that we were not like other couples and our children were not like other children. We were not going to let kids slow us down in our passion for travel. And besides, we call two different countries home, so it is necessary that we travel. A child's home is where ever the parents make it, we believed. Children are portable, we'll strap the kids on our backs and off we'll go, we eagerly convinced our parents who indulged us with only a very slight raise of the eyebrow.

Ha.

Two kids and many transcontinental trips later, we are humbly eating our words. Traveling with kids is exhausting. You cannot just strap them and off you go. Not if you need sleep. Which we did not need for the first two weeks, but we now covet sleep like a wolf eating prey, or wolf-eat-wolf which the past two days have been between darling hubs and I. Our biggest spat is who gets to sleep on the hide-a-bed in the other room (it's my turn tonight, by the way, so expect a perkier Jenna to engage you tomorrow).

Kids need consistency and a routine and a bed that smells like them to be their normal selves. Which you have none of when you travel. And bless our sweet children, they hold it together all day, game for whatever new adventure we introduce them to, being little darlings to their grandparents and in general looking totally acclimated.

Until night hits. Poppie is a sleeper and prefers the dark, quiet and being alone when she sleeps. Finn needs the light on, a soft noise in the background and prefers one of us to be within arm's reach at night. I will leave it to your own imagination to guess how well this works when we all share a room in a foreign place.



However, if I was writing this well-slept and feeling perky, I would be writing about what a fantastic time we are having and how impressed I am with our children's versatility. Because we are having a fantastic time and the kids are amazingly versatile. I am shocked by how quickly Finn has changed the structure of his language to be better understood. English and American English are very different languages when your vocabulary is smaller than an adult's. Finn quickly learned to replace American words with English ones so people will know what he is talking about without having to ask him to repeat it. He is loving all the parent-time and has been so well behaved, especially this last week once he got more settled into the routine of travel.


And little Poppie has been through a major growth spurt since arriving and her little personality is just busting out all over the place. When Finn went through a similar growth spurt at her age, I remember it being extremely difficult for him (and us) and yet Poppie is being very graceful about the wild changes happening in her little head and body. She is becoming quite the mini-me and will even reprimand Finn with an 'es-stoppp' if he is doing something that I previously told him to stop earlier.



And despite how exhausted we are, neither of us want to stop traveling with the kids. Our pillow talk is about how we can improve our planning next time, how we can make this small tweak or that little change to make it easier on the kids (and us) in the future. And I am sure we will. This phase must be the hardest phase, surely (cue: someone with experience telling me toddlers are the hardest to travel with of all the ages). The memories that we are all storing up on a trip like this will last a lifetime and at the end of the day it is well worth it.