My plans for 2014

We're keeping our travels low key this year. No international jaunts planned for right now, but kind of like 2013, trips "pop up". Right now, most of our travel will be by airplane and car to see family and friends domestically. There's a thrill in visiting far off places, especially when I've never been there before, but this year, I'm resolved to stay close to home and take it a bit easy on the travel side.

How about you? Where do you plan to travel?

Happy New Year!

Where do you plan to travel in 2014? This year, to be honest, our travel schedule is fairly light, with only one trip planned for later this year. No international trips planned because as daunting as it was with one child, we're still trying to work through all the logistics now that we have two. I'll be sure to keep this blog updated with our adventures as we try to figure out how to get two of everything from point A to point B (road trips sound really good, actually!).

Happy New Year!

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So how did that trip turn out anyway?

So a while ago, I blogged about our absolutely nightmarish flight to San Francisco -- the first leg of our 30 hour journey to Singapore. That first flight was an eye opener for us because as I mentioned in that post, my husband and I are seasoned travelers and we had taken Baby on several flights prior to this one and they had all gone swimmingly. And yet on that particular flight, something had gone wrong.

I think it's worthwhile to take a postmortem every now and then and in this particular situation, we really wanted to avoid the hellish situation again. Did I mention we had 27 hours to go? And that at some point in the future, we'd have to return to the States? And that we were planning a trip to India that would be at least 19 hours one way? So yes, a postmortem analysis was absolutely necessary so we didn't repeat the same mistakes we made on that San Francisco flight.

Here's what I came up with:

1. We were tired. We were tired even before we began the journey. Knowing we'd have to leave for the airport before 6 am to catch our flight, we still didn't go to bed before 11 pm. And if you've ever had an early morning flight, you know it's next to impossible to sleep well because you're so worried about oversleeping and missing your flight. The lack of rest ahead of the trip made us cranky and stressed out and I think Baby caught on to our nervousness. On all of our other trips, we were laid back and so was she.

2. We had lots of little bags. We are light packers in general, but when you're heading overseas with a baby for an extended period of time, your bags fill up quickly with things like formula, diapers, and food pouches. That's all fine if you have big enough bags to consolidate the stuff into, but we didn't. My husband and I are business travelers and as such, we had lots of little suitcases. It made for a difficult transportation issue as with the Baby, we just never had enough hands to transport it all and it was just distracting to manage it all.

3. You can never time a bottle on the plane. It's a myth that one can do this, but it's not possible. On our San Francisco flight, we were delayed on the tarmack and so our timing was off. Baby was well done her bottle and agitated by the time we took off. This, however, was a "mistake" we repeated a few months later when we went to India as we were delayed on the ground for nearly 2 hours and as a result, our crabby Baby got her bottle well before take off. We didn't have a back up plan in case of The Delayed Bottle-Take Off Problem and to be honest, we still don't.

4. We were in a rush to get off the plane and didn't take a moment to compose ourselves. We only had a 90 minute or so connection and so we rushed to get off the plane and didn't take the time to double-check our seats and make sure we had everything we needed. The result was we left a piece of our car seat behind and I spent most of my time running between gates trying to locate the piece (which, by the way, I didn't; we ended up ordering a replacement when we returned to the US). We now don't rush off the plane unless we really have to; we take our time and catch our breath and make sure we got everything off the plane.


There is, however, a happy ending to this story. We were so exhausted after our frantic interlude in the San Francisco airport that we settled in nicely on our flight to Tokyo and Baby actually slept a chunk of the time too! We ended up having a nice flight (and a nice time in the Tokyo airport, which has play areas, yo!) and our connecting Tokyo-Singapore flight was also uneventful. I guess when you start from absolute chaos like we did that day, there's really nowhere to go but up (pun unintended).

Happy August 1st!

I know it's been a while since my last post, but I had a good reason, honest! My in-laws were in town for a week so we spent the week prior to their visit getting the house in ship-shape and then after they left, we were still motivated by the projects we'd begun before they came and it just slipped my mind to come and update the blog.

That being said, I want to talk about visiting grandparents and the impact on kids. Not so much a travel story, but I've noticed since my kid has gotten older, she has become much, much more aware of the people around her and she develops deep and strong attachments to certain people. She is very interested and attached to both sets of grandparents and so when they leave after visiting, she's definitely a sad little cookie.

Since both sets of grandparents live out of town and don't visit frequently, we've taken to Skyping them quite frequently. At my daughter's age, she just wants to see their faces, maybe say a few words. Her attention span is quite literally 30 seconds for nearly any activity, even for beloved grandparents! However, I've noticed once she sees their faces on the computer screen, she's a much happier kid. It's almost like she needs to be reassured that they are still out there and not gone forever. It also helps to show her pictures of the visit so she can remember some of the happy times they spent together.

As she gets older, I'm sure the Skype conversations will get more involved and she will be more participatory. I'm just glad she'll be able to maintain relationships with out-of-town relatives so easily and fluidly. Isn't technology grand?

Talk back to me

Do you have any tips or questions about traveling with a baby? Share them with me! I can be reached at seemag1@yahoo.com.

Breastfeeding and car trips

I've talked a lot about airline travel just because we have so much experience with it and tend to travel that way a lot, but car trips with a baby can be equally stressful!

When Baby was between 4 to 8 months old, I traveled about 3 hours one way by car by myself and it was definitely stressful since I couldn't really check on Baby unless I stopped the car and if she was upset, I had to stop wherever I was to console her or feed her. Luckily, I knew the route I was traveling like the back of my hand so I knew of good and safe places to stop. However, a few times, I was caught unaware with a hungry baby who was rejecting her bottle and I had to pull over on shoulders to breastfeed. One time, I pulled in the parking lot of an abandoned and dilapidated restaurant and another time, it was just a 'park area' in a wood area. Scary. I sat in the back of the car with Baby hoping for a fast feed so I could get the heck out of dodge!

My biggest tips to breastfeeding moms whose babies won't take a bottle during the drive is to carefully study the route ahead of time (if you don't already know it well) and pick out good places to stop along the way. Always try for a populated area but as my experience has shown, it's not always possible! Ask friends/family for recommendations and perhaps check out the route on Google maps to identify large population areas where there could be a convenient area to pull off.

I don't have any experience, by the way, of pumping while in the car (I'm assuming the pumping is not happening while driving!), so if anyone has any thoughts to share on the subject, please do so!

To grandmother's house we go

We took our first car trip to see the grandparents when baby was just shy of 8 weeks. Under normal circumstances, the drive takes about 3 hours, depending on whether we stop. We decided to take the 'usual' route as we are very aware of all the 'good' places to stop (i.e., clean bathrooms!). Traveling with a baby, however, introduced a new kink to the plan. Would the normally reliable clean bathroom stops also have changing tables? And while we're at it, how does one change a baby's diaper on one of those fold-out changing tables?

The question seems silly now in retrospect; we've changed diapers all over the world and in so many different conditions that our initial worry about how/where to change diapers on a fairly straightforward car trip seems almost nonsensical. It's just as the time we were first time parents with this teeny tiny baby and the logistics of moving from point A to point B were daunting. How do you feed a baby in a moving car if you're breast feeding? Do you stop? Do you take baby out of carseat and keep driving? Do you give a bottle even though most breastfeeding advice at that age say no, no, no?

Packing for this three hour trip took us two days. TWO DAYS. I admit to over-packing on baby's clothes (seriously, at this age the clothes are SO cute and you just want to take EVERYTHING), but everything else seems (even today) to have been reasonable for that age. Among other things, we took my Medela Pump in Style, a sound machine, and the Graco SnugRider Elite. Now these things might not seem like big items, but little things like this quickly add up and we were trying to fit all of it into the back seat of a Prius. Back before baby, the Prius seemed like an enormous upgrade from my Corolla, but we were starting to realize very quickly that babies travel with a lot of stuff and there was a reason why people upsized their vehicles big time once the kids came along.

Our trip went smoothly, almost too smoothly. We left around naptime and ignored the breastfeeding advice and gave the baby a bottle in the car and she felt promptly asleep and then proceeded to sleep all the way to the grandparents' place. The issue of diaper changes on the road was pushed to a future road trip as seriously, who wants to wake a sleeping baby? If only future trips turned out to be as easy and peaceful as this one was.

The good news is that a year after we made that trip, we've got our packing down from two days to two hours. Travel enough and you develop a rhythm or as the tired adage goes, practice makes perfect. You figure out what you really need and what you can do without and what you can improvise on the road; honestly, the lighter you can travel, the easier and better it is. The good news is babies do need less stuff to travel with as they get older; it's just that the stuff they need gets bigger (making the Prius seem even smaller!). Also, as my husband is fond of pointing out, most places we go to have stores and we can always buy the thing we forgot. Because of these factors, we've managed to whittle down on the amount of stuff we need to take. I'll talk about some of our makeshift solutions in another post, but there's one problem we haven't solved: I still overpack when it comes to baby's wardrobe.

About me

I'm a stay-at-home mom of a lively toddler who, to date, has three stamps in her passport and has flown on 19 different flight segments, not to mention has also traveled by taxi, bus, boat, and car. I started this blog because traveling with a baby was daunting to me, even though I had been a frequent traveler prior to baby. Still, traveling has been such a huge part of our life that we didn't necessarily feel like we could slow down. So we made some adjustments, experimented here and there, hit friends up for advice, and now we have circled the globe with baby and have learned a lot from our experiences. We learned what techniques work for us, what doesn't, what products are worthwhile and which ones aren't, and more importantly, we learned that becoming parents doesn't mean staying home. There's a whole lot of world out there and we can't wait to share it with our baby.