We took a short road trip, two hours north to Bellingham this year to celebrate with family friends. While we're not afraid to fly anywhere in the world, I have to admit that we are complete wimps when it comes to road trips. Little D can barely make it across town in the car without crying, so our main roadtrip strategy is to time trips during naptime or at night.
This trip was no exception, we took the easy way out, leaving at bedtime on Wednesday night and checking into a hotel when we arrived in Bellingham. We returned the next night at bedtime after a (wonderful) Thanksgiving dinner. The kids slept well in the car, and the drive was relaxing and uneventful for us.
After almost a month at home, the kids were delighted to be in a hotel again, and couldn't wait to explore. The hotel's indoor pool was predictably popular with the kids (eliciting a screech from little D), as were the room service pancakes and fresh fruit. Unlike our usual vacations, where we try to get up and out as soon as possible to see the sights, it was nice to lounge around in the morning knowing that most everything was closed. I have to say, though, my favorite feature of pretty much any hotel is the blackout drapes that enable us all to sleep in a little in the morning.
We're all for buying the kids a few new toys to get through a long plane ride or car trip, but frankly we don't want to break the shopping budget before we even leave town. Even more importantly, it can take more time to gather up the right toys than I have in the last few days before leaving on vacation.
Here are ten eleven of my favorite things to bring along that we already have at home. Best of all, most of them can be left on the plane when you're done.
Three words: "blue painter's tape." If you can't figure out what to do with it, don't worry, any toddler can show you.
Pipe cleaners are fascinating to twist into different shapes and attach together. Who knows, you might even use one to fix something.
Books. Of course you can bring new books, but it's always comforting to have a couple of favorites from home. One of our favorites for travel is
Airplanes by Byron Barton
MP3 player (or music on a laptop) and headphones loaded with familiar music. Our kids were able to sit still enough to keep earbuds in at age 1.
Colorforms or reusable stickers. We especially like the original, shape based, ones, but whatever you have will work. If you have a window seat, your child can stick them on the window
It's no secret that young toddlers love boxes. Save the boxes from your cosmetics purchases and collapse them to put in your carryon. You can put them back together once you're on the flight.
Crayons & a small spiral bound pad of paper (this way your child can draw in the stroller too). If the crayons get on the tray table, use a wet-nap to clean up. For older kids, you can also play games like hangman and tic-tac-toe.
Catalogs. Kids just learning to speak think it is super fun to look at pictures of babies & different household items. Older kids will energetically circle every single thing they wish they had and torture your for the remainder of the trip about them (but it's better than having them kick the seat isn't it)
A lightweight scarf can be used for peek-a-boo or made into dress up clothing (a hat, a cape, a skirt, a purse, a pirate eye patch, etc etc etc.)
Small playdough container or silly putty. The container itself can be fun to play with long after the dough is gone.
A deck of cards. You can teach them to count and play simple games, and they'll love watching you shuffle.
We've posted our guides to Family Travel in Seville and Madrid. They're complete with hotel recommendations, apartment rental recommendations, family friendly restaurants, fun kids activities, and tips for visiting the major attractions with kids. Each includes several half-day itiniaries, with maps, that make it easy to plan your travel days.
While we're not big fans of using a sedative to get our kids to sleep on a plane, especially in light of the recent
warnings, so we've gotten pretty sophisticated in our tactics for getting our baby and toddler to nap on the plane.
Here are our top tips:
Schedule flights at nap time or bedtime, and make sure that your kids get plenty of physical activity before the flight. Many airports have a play area (ask a gate agent) but if yours doesn't you can often find a lightly used gate for them to run around.
Seat your child in the window seat where there will be less distraction from passing flight attendants and passengers. Once you takeoff, close the window shade and turn off the overhead lights.
A full tummy makes everyone drowsy. Take some time after clearing security to make sure that your child is well fed, preferably with lots of protein and not very much sugar.
Takeoff is the easiest time to get your child to sleep as there's little activity in the cabin and the soothing engine noise is at its loudest.
We go through as much of our sleep routine as possible, including putting on Pajamas, reading books, and singing quietly or giving them earbuds and an mp3 player loaded with calm music. (I figure my neighbors would rather hear quiet singing than loud crying.) We tell the kids that it's going to be a long, boring flight and its best to go to sleep, so that they understand what we're expecting.
A sippy full of milk will not only help clear your child's ears during takeoff, but milk also has a mild sedative effect (as does sucking on a sippy or bottle. Of course it's no secret that breastfeeding, especially with a cover, super effective at inducing sleep.
This time of year, every parent gets anxious about their travel plans and keeping their young kids occupied on long plane flights. Besides packing a few great travel toys you'll want to have some airplane activities that won't break or get lost.
Here are our top ten airplane activities for toddlers and preschoolers that won't increase the size of your luggage!
Go on a scavenger hunt through the airplane magazine. On each page, pick one item that your child has to locate. For older children, hand them the magazine and say "can you find a picture of an airplane?"
Put some fun pictures onto your digital camera (you're carrying it anyway). Good candidates are pictures of the people and places you are going to visit or pictures of a recent adventure (like the zoo). During the flight, you can relive the fun and tell stories about where/who you're visiting.
When the flight attendant delivers drinks, ask for a cup, a couple ice cubes, and a straw. There are endless games with this combination. Ice is fascinating to toddlers in and of itself, and you can teach them to swirl it on the bottom of the cup, or catch it on the straw (airplane ice usually has a hole in the middle). Watch that the ice doesn't end up in their mouth though (choking hazard).
Teach yourself some new
finger rhymes (e.g. "where is thumbkin") before you go.
Get your children playing with the neighbors in front of and behind you before the plane takes off. (Peek-a-boo and kiss-blowing are hard for even the most stoic travelers to resist). Your seat-mates will be a lot more understanding if your children have a difficult time later once they've seen them at their cutest, and you never know what fun entertainment they'll come up with.
Extend snack time by challenging your child. "What is the is the smallest bite you can take" or "see if you can eat just one at a time (tricky for little fingers). Pack your snacks in Tupperware & the packaging becomes a toy when the snack is done.
For young toddlers, screwing and unscrewing the top on a plastic water bottle is great fun (watch carefully as small tops are a choke hazard). Ask the flight attendant to bring you an empty bottle if you're not carrying one.
Learning how to fasten and unfasten an "old fashioned" seatbelt, jacket zipper, and snaps or buttons on their clothing (or a carryon bag) can keep them occupied for a long time
Have your toddler help you make up fanciful stories about what you will do on your trip. For young toddlers, they might choose between two options, while older kids will be able to fill in parts of the stories.
Three words: Barf bag puppets
You've already killed quite a bit of time without breaking into your secret stash of travel toys and books. Our next post will cover our favorite airplane toys for toddlers
We've added a new feature to our DeliciousBaby travel guides: itineraries. Each ½-day itinerary is focused around one neighborhood, filled with kid-friendly, cultural activities, food options, and, when appropriate, tips about nearby shopping! Best of all, when you click the "printer" icon, you get a special version with a large map that's perfect for printing and taking with you on your destination…no heavy guide book required!
So far on this trip, we've mainly left the kids home with the nanny for naptime and bedtime so that we could get out and get some grownup time. Today we thought we'd try taking the Nanny with us to the Prado museum to help out with the kids. We figured we'd play things by ear a little, giving her some break time to explore the museum on her own, doing the same ourselves at some point, and spending some time all together. Knowing that the Retiro park is right nearby, we also packed a picnic lunch to bring with us.
What we didn't plan for, was the huge, fun looking playground between the metro station and the Prado museum… Every parent knows when they can push their kids a little further and when they cannot. It didn't take a mind reader to know that dragging the kids past a playground and into a museum wouldn't go well… for anyone. So we sent the nanny ahead to enjoy the museum solo & we hung out with the kids for a while. They had a blast playing in the sand, trying to figure out how to interact with the local kids, and just generally being toddlers. E even made friends with a little girl who happened to be from Seattle.
Once they seemed worn out, we got E in his stroller with a snack & D in the sling (I use an
Ergo baby carrier) and headed towards the museum. We rushed through the Goya rooms, not wanting the kids to dwell on those dark paintings for two long, and found ourselves in a hall filled with huge Italian Renaissance artworks. Both kids were thrilled, with D looking every direction in awe and then finally drifting off to sleep. E eventually got bored & hungry, so we called the nanny on her cell phone to pick him up and take him to lunch (thankfully we had that picnic planned) while we visited the rest of the museum (and revisited the Goyas).
Everyone was exhausted, so we skipped the park, helped the nanny get back to the hotel with the kids, and headed out for some grown up time. The kids are clearly starting to get burnt out on the museum scene, so I'm glad that we had the extra help today, it kept us from feeling like we needed to drag our children through more than they were comfortable with.
I've posted our guide to Family Travel in Barcelona, complete with a hotel recommendations (and the name of the apartment rental company we used), family friendly restaurants, fun kids activities, and tips for visiting the major attractions with kids.
The kids are clearly getting a little tired of travelling. They were a little bit annoyed about being uprooted again when we left Sevilla, though they're both super excited to explore the new hotel room. They're also missing the nanny a little bit since she's not as available now that we're in separate hotel rooms. This is a good reminder for me in terms of pacing, I think three destinations is about the maximum that they can handle right now. As they get a little older, I'm sure we'll be able to ask them to uproot and get used to sleeping in a new place a little more frequently, but for this trip I think we got the pace and number of destinations right.
E is thrilled to be back in a major city with public transportation and desperate to ride every bus we pass and go into every metro station on our route (he's figured out how to recognize them). Today we thought we'd take him to the train museum, just for fun. The museum has lots of old train cars, some for climbing on, a steam train and more. I checked the website for hours, figured out our route, and we were off. There was a nice big directional sign across from the train station, and an train engine outside to climb, perfect. But to our surprise, the museum itself had a small sign on the door saying that they're closed for renovation! Wow, what a huge bummer after promising a train museum (and then explaining 10 times that there would be trains inside, not more boring pictures) and making the trip across town.
Luckily there was a small science museum next door, and even though it didn't seem age appropriate, we took the kids in & they ended up having a great time. Though it wasn't the type of world class science museum you'd expect in a major city like Madrid (it felt more appropriate to someplace the size of Tacoma) there were enough hands on exhibits to keep the kids entertained, and a nice clean floor for D to crawl around on.
Next up, lunch, and then we can drop the kids home with the Nanny for naptime.
Food has started to be a challenge again as well. D is absolutely fed up with sitting on my lap and having me put food in her mouth. I think E is going to scream if he sees another Spanish Tortilla, and I'm tired of watching him eat peanut butter sandwiches and olives. After the museum we decided to take the subway back to a chain restaurant I'd spotted called "The Wok." The Wok seemed to be a takeoff on London's Wagamama, with modern design and a large selection of Asian noodle dishes. P & I snacked knowing that we'd be off to eat tapas as soon as the kids were safely back in the hotel room. The kids, however, could not have been more delighted. There was a high chair for D, and familiar asian noodle stir fry and spring rolls for E. Both of them ate more than I've seen them eat in days, and were in great spirits. It says something interesting about our lives that my kids were delighted in an asian fast food place, but completely rejected Mc Donalds.
All in all, a great morning outing, despite the closed attraction & the non-local food!
I'm inspired by
this article in the New York Times
about long term travel with kids. When P and I were first married, we took six months off to travel, backpacking through the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
It was difficult to put our friendships and our work on hold, we reasoned that we'd never again be freer than we were at that point in time. We had, of course, all sorts of worries: would we get a disease, would we be homesick, would be sick of one another? I probably would never have gone had my husband not persisted in getting me to look at what I was worried about, learn more about the destinations, and really think about how much the trip would mean to me (and him).
I won't go on about all the things we learned on our adenture. It's sufficient to say that we came back a little humbler about our place in the world.
A few years later I had major surgery and then herniated a disc in my back. I was bedridden for almost six months. For months, I didn't know whether I would ever walk properly again. My husband set up an early MediaCenter beta on our home TV and I spent hours each day looking at pictures of our trip. They helped me remember how strong I felt during the time we were travelling and they helped me put aside the pain of the moment. Most of all, though, they made me grateful that I had seized the moment and not put of the trip of my dreams until some magic point in the future.
Looking back at that trip now, I can't believe I ever considered not going. In some sense, it made me see that anything is possible.
Now, years later, I'm completely recovered, and we have two wonderful children. Travel is an important enough part of our lives that we've made a commitment to keep doing it. True it's not as easy as it once was. Yes, we have to consider safety more carefully than when it was just the two of us. Having the kids, though, opens up whole new worlds to us as well. They've forced us to slow down the pace a little and get to know the places we visit more intimately. People want to interact with them, and in turn with us. And of course, we hope that our children will learn and grow as much from their travels as we do. We're forced into local markets, pharmacies, and playgrounds. All-in-all, it's delicious
Still, I feel, we've been fairly cautious overall. We've made several trips to Europe, but no place more challenging. Though both my husband and I are self employed, we've done nothing longer than a month. What's next? I'm not sure… but I'm glad that this article got me thinking a little more broadly.
About Me I'm Debbie, mother of three delicious kids and I write about traveling with little kids. That's my daughter in the backpack and my son in Paris on Halloween.
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." If you can't figure out what to do with it, don't worry, any toddler can show you.
are fascinating to twist into different shapes and attach together. Who knows, you might even use one to fix something.
