I shared some thoughts on traveling with little kids on Instagram yesterday, and it got such a nice response there that I wanted to reshare it and add a few more ramblings here as well!
My parents instilled in me a strong love of travel that I’m eager to share with our kids, and I know many of you in a similar stage of life feel the same! Growing up, we had a family goal to make it to all 50 states as a family, and while I think we made it somewhere in the high 30s before I went off to college, I now look back in absolute awe at my parents spending their limited free time packed into a minivan with their four children (!), driving 8 hours across Wyoming (!!) to take a picture in front of the Nebraska state sign (!!!). I could totally be mixing up the states and/or the directions here (as I am very wont to do), but you get the idea.
Travel with kids is hard! And I think I put pressure on myself (and maybe sharing parts of my life on the internet exacerbates that pressure to an extent) to “have it all figured out” and be able to report back to you guys on what worked best, and where to stay, and how to have the best trip ever recreating this perfect itinerary with your own family, and at the end of the day I feel so unqualified to answer those questions as I’m still seeking the answers myself.
Like, you can spend four weeks leading up to the trip making packing lists and charging iPads and reading books about your destination to drum up everyone’s excitement — and your toddler could still lose their mind because they’re overtired and change their mind about wanting a plain croissant when you’ve just bought everyone pains au chocolat (ahem).
I get why people’s opinions on family travel run the gamut. We have friends who just returned from two weeks in Japan with three kids under 5 and friends who plan to wait to travel internationally until their kids are old enough to remember it more clearly. And I really don’t think either way is right or wrong or better or worse! Traveling with kids (like parenthood in general?) is hard no matter how you do it, and I think it’s good to remember (note to self) that for every cute smiling family travel photo you see on Instagram, there was almost certainly a bedtime protest or an ill-timed nap or a sibling squabble immediately before or after.
I guess that’s why I wrote what I wrote below. Travel with kids isn’t possible to sum up neatly like, “How was your trip?” and “Oh, it was amazing!”, you know? It was amazing, AND it was hard, AND I cried happy tears on two different nights, AND I’m-so-exhausted-I’m-convinced-this-is-how-people-feel-as-they-climb-Everest (it definitely is though, right?) all wrapped into one.
Anyway! I will treasure these new memories for the rest of my life AND I am elated at the thought of not going anywhere the next couple months. 🙂 Here is what I wrote on Instagram yesterday, and I hope it resonates with some of you too.
I have lots of photos I want to share from our quick trip to Paris and London with our two older little guys, but honestly very few helpful tips or tricks to share with anyone embarking on the same. Travel with little kids is hard — there are always too many bags and never enough sleep, and I’m often guilty of trying to pack in too many adventures instead of going at their pace — and if there’s a hack or a shortcut to make it all more effortless, I have certainly yet to discover it. But then there’s a sliver of a second where you catch your 3- and 4-year-olds studying Monet’s Water Lilies (albeit looking for frogs in the water, because of course) and you have to blink back tears, because for a moment in time, the juice is completely worth the squeeze. 💙
P.S. More photos from our trip have been posted and will be posted in the Paris highlight (and forthcoming London highlight) on Instagram here!
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