Traveling with Children: PYL In-Flight: July 5, 2023
Welcome Back My Memorable Passengers:
Back in August 2000 when we found out that I was pregnant with our first child Adam, my husband Zeke and I declared that we would still travel and eat out at restaurants once he was born. We were determined to continue to enjoy our adult lives despite having children. He was two days old when we left CPMC (the hospital he and I were both born at in San Francisco) and as soon as we got home, we put Adam into the infant carrier and pushed him in the Snap n Go from our flat in the Mission to a nearby brewery for lunch. I think it was fine as I don’t remember it not being so.
Adam was 10 months old when I took him on a plane for the first time.
We (me and Adam) traveled with my friend Vivian to visit our mutual friend Bonnie in South Carolina. Immediately after that visit, Adam and I flew to Pittsburgh, PA to visit my friend Jayne and her daughter Sarah who was turning 1. (It blows my mind that Sarah and Adam both just graduated from college!)
Finn was eight months when they took their first plane ride when I traveled solo with both Finn and Adam to Palm Springs.
We spent a week there with my parents and I still remember walking through the airport wearing Finn on my chest in the Baby Bjorn, a travel backpack on my back, pushing Adam in the stroller with Finn’s carseat on the back of the stroller, and having to disassemble all of it to go through security. Someone offered to help but I had a process and was determined to do it on my own.
Finn was 13 months when we first went to Mexico as a family, and almost two and a half years old when we flew as a family to Europe for the first time.
Finn was awake until the last 45 minutes of the flight to Frankfurt where we had a layover on our way to Dublin, Ireland. I remember getting both of the kids settled down in the lounge for a nap before our next flight only to be notified that we had to walk back through security as part of their 3:30 PM protocol. That was a painful travel experience.
We trained them both early to behave in restaurants and on airplanes so that we could continue to have amazing experiences as we raised children, and to introduce them to the same. We wanted to build memories as a family.
It definitely wasn’t easy nor was it cheap. It took a lot of planning and I frequently packed lots of books, toys, and snacks to distract, and we timed activities and meals to minimize meltdowns. We catered to the needs of our kids while still having an adventure.
While we thought we were presenting them with amazing opportunities, experiences, and memories, we didn’t realize how little of these trips they would remember.
Finn has memories of Mexico and Palm Springs but since we went every other year to the same place in Mexico and every year to the Palm Springs Tennis Club, Finn’s memories are not in any sort of chronological order. Finn has memories, in snapshots, of our home exchanges in France in 2013 and 2015 but they are limited. The same for most of our travel before Finn was a teenager.
So this raises the question of whether it was worth it or not.
Would we have done it differently given what we now know?
The answer is, “it’s complicated.”
Since I worked so much, I didn’t want to travel without the kids because that would have been more time away from them. I wanted to travel. I wanted to eat out at restaurants. I wanted to go to museums. I wanted to explore new places. These were things that were and continue to be important to me.
If you think about it, if you decide to have children and put your own life on hold, you could be centering your life around your children for 18 years, assuming you only have one child. Add more kids and depending on the number of them and their age differences, it is even more.
If we assume we are going to have 80 good years, that’s 25% of our lives. For most of us, those are prime years. We were 31 when we had Adam and 52 when Finn went off to college so that’s twenty-one and a half years for us.
What I do wish we had done differently was to have traveled together as a couple more, trusting that the time we spent with our kids was good and enough (and if they weren’t going to remember much anyway, what harm was it going to do?). This would have been better for our relationship which meant that it would have been better for us as a family unit.
We are making up for lost time as a couple and it is significantly easier now that it’s just the two of us (except for George who makes it a little bit complicated).
We are still committed to traveling with our children as evidenced by my trips to Europe with Finn last summer and Adam last month, Zeke’s cycling and camping trips with Finn, and our Christmas trip to Mexico as a family. With Adam moving to Denver next week, our next family trip will be to the Denver area at Thanksgiving.
Now, I love it that our kids’ interests are interesting enough to drive our travel and adventures.
The memories we now make will last us all a lifetime, or at least until our (mine and Zeke’s) minds start to go. We are counting on at least another 20 good years before our kids will be asking us what we remember from our travels, surprised when we say only the snapshots.
May you find peace, acceptance, and love today as you navigate being human.
With much love and gratitude,
Terri
This week’s song: Escape (the PIna Colada song) by Rupert Holmes. You have to watch this video. I had no idea the singer looked like this. Hilarious! I couldn’t resist this song for this week.The other option was Memories from Cats but I played that way too many times on the cello in symphonic orchestra in the 8th grade and hate that song.
Journal prompt / reflection: What’s your earliest travel memory? How has that influenced your travel and adventure as you’ve grown older?
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