Last week we came home from our third trip of the year with two little kids. Our first one in March ushered in Spring with a road trip out to Durham, North Carolina and this last one we headed up to Northfield and Minneapolis, Minnesota. In between I took the kids down to Wheaton, Illinois when Evan had a school trip bringing his eighth graders out to DC.
Over those three trips, we got to connect with some of our very dearest friends—all of whom were at our wedding (12 years ago!)—including our best man and maid of honor. They all have kids within a few months of our kids (which I’d like to point out is a lot of toddlers) and it’s such a privilege to see our friends parent and to watch these little people learn about the world. I love catching an expression or the tilt of a little head that perfectly mirrors our adult friends’ faces and mannerisms. Travels with toddlers is a bit like toddlers themselves: intense, raw, beautiful, and exhausting.
So here are a few reflections on the great and hard parts of travels with toddlers, and in a separate post, I’ll tell you what we packed to feed and entertain the kids.
#1. Traveling with (and hosting) toddlers is a vulnerable business.
When you spend a few days (and nights) with people, they get to see your kids have meltdowns and conflicts (and maybe more than normal because everyone’s routines are off). Toddlers don’t really wait until you’re in the privacy of your guest room to mention that they did not appreciate the spinach at breakfast, or quietly tell you that they’re feeling left out because someone isn’t sharing toys with them. No, they cry and scream and carry on right there, in front of God and everyone. Then you as a parent are probably embarrassed (at least a little bit) and either try to be extra patient (that comes across as lenient) or extra firm (that comes across as punitive). It’s all a bit revealing. In my day to day life, I like to trundle us all home when a play date goes south, but when you’re staying with people for a week, you get to be all up in each other’s business.
Three hours into my solo Wheaton, Illinois trip at my good friend Julie’s, Jackson threw a tennis ball into my bowl of soup as I carried it to the table. The soup went everywhere: on the floor, on the wall, on the chairs, on kids’ feet, and hands. Everywhere. It took at least 20 minutes to clean up. And for days we found little bits of dried soup in various places. And while that was by far the biggest mess that my children created, it was not the only one they made. When people invite you into their homes, you make their kitchen and bathroom messy, and it’s hard to clean up after yourselves in a way that is not at least somewhat of an inconvenience to your hosts. You try to put away the dishes from their dishwasher, but don’t know where all the little cups and spoons go. Toddlers make poor house guests.
Looking back now, I can see that while I do a pretty good job structuring my everyday life to keep my anxiety levels pretty low, traveling with kids kicks up my anxiety because there are just too many variables to try and control. I get anxious about what to pack (will my friends think I packed WAY too much? What if I forgot something important that we’d have to buy or do without?) or making a big mess in the kitchen (will my friends be annoyed that I couldn’t clean up after myself?). And then after we left, I got a kind of friend-hangover where I’d wonder if our friends really didn’t like me and were annoyed with something I said or did. This particular fear is usually a sign to me that I have a bit of free-floating anxiety. For Enneagram nerds I wonder if this is a very 1 with a 2 wing problem.
Part of me knows that these are not objectively very rational thoughts: no one cares how much you bring, no one expects you to practice leave-no-trace camping in their kitchens (I don’t expect my guests to do that!), and my friends still like me (I think. I’m 95% sure.). So I just have to make space for myself to understand that traveling with kids raises my anxiety level, and I have to be a little more gracious with myself and take a deep breath an remember that it’s ok to be a bit of an imposition, and my friends like me anyway.
I love to be a gracious host, creating a welcoming and peaceful place for people to rest and be restored. I learn to become a more patient and welcoming host when I myself receive the grace of a good welcome: when friends wash our dishes for us as we wrangle resistant children into bed, or talk over our kids’ crying because it genuinely doesn’t bother them, or don’t mind when we’re 45 minutes later than we thought we’d be because well insert the reason: a poopy diaper, a wrong turn on a morning walk, my need to walk a long way even on vacation, traffic back up at the Starbucks window, our stroller breaking, trying to get gas at a Costco that didn’t have a gas station, etc., etc..
The thing is that our friends want to be a part of our lives, the raw unedited parts that never make it onto our Instagram feeds. They want to put out guest towels for us to wash our dirty hands on.
Because when you spend a weekend together, in between the sweet and crazy antics of the kids, you get to catch up, to connect, to share what you’ve been up to, and introduce some of the most important people in your life to each other. Even if those people end up fighting over who gets to go down the slide first.
#2. Short visits every couple of years to watch kids grow are important.
While I wish that I could see all my friends’ kids every week at the park or at church, seeing our friends’ kids every year or two for a couple of nights weaves us into each other’s lives. I’m a presence in my goddaughter’s life through sending her birthday and Christmas presents and seeing her once or twice a year.
Peaking into each other’s lives, even for a few days, matters.
In all the messy loudness of toddler years, the holding of sweet babies (or waving at them if they’re like my children and prefer NOT to be held by anyone else), reading books to a pile of kids on the couch and pretending to not be interested as your friends negotiate how many bites of lunch have to be eaten–those things tie us together.
They let us picture what life is like, how it moves parallel to our own lives. It reminds us that we all have our own unique family culture, approach to parenting, with strengths and weaknesses, but how in the end we are all trying to get green things in the kids, reminding them to be kind to each other, and trying to keep them safe and healthy.
When we drop in to the day to day business of our friends we provide each other with the opportunity to reflect back on the big highs and lows of the past years while also sharing the small things that don’t make Christmas letters or social media updates: silly words a three year old makes up while flopping down on a bed “kaboomba!”, or how much the baby hates her sun hat if she’s reminded it’s there, or how the five year old thought the word “baba ganoush” is hilarious and said it 50 times a day for a week. Those are the things that make up a friendship.
A few weeks ago Lily threw up for the first time, in the middle of our birthday dinner for Jackson’s godmother Brittany who was visiting us from DC. In my 3 1/2 years of mothering it was my first legit vomit. But Brittany and Daniel’s 2 1/2 year old has a super sensitive gag reflex, and they were not phased for a second (and neither was the little guy, who just said “vomit” repeatedly to show that he knew what was going on). They didn’t miss a beat in conversation and just helped us clean it up and decide that Lily probably had just swallowed a lot of phlegm from her cold. And sure enough the next day she was back to herself.
#3 Traveling as a family can make some of the best memories
Not all my memories are of the tennis balls in soup or babies throwing up kind (even though in time those have become more funny than how awful they felt at the time). Lily took her first independent steps at Julie’s house. Now every time we go to visit, I’ll point to that spot in her kitchen. Or a few weeks later up in Northfield, Lily decided to become a confident walker at Bridget’s house, going from maybe five consecutive steps to just walking clear across their house.
In our trip to North Carolina, Jackson got to visit his first children’s museum, when his godparents came to Milwaukee we took him to the zoo for his first real time, and in Northfield we discovered that he wanted to listen to the Boxcar Children (a chapter book I thought he wouldn’t be interested in for years).
In Wheaton I accidentally took him and the seven-year-old twins on a four-mile walk…without water. And he walked the whole way. (I did buy some water at a gas station on the way back. Best over-priced water bottle ever. I squirted water into their mouths, and they all pretended to be baby swans since we had just passed a lake with swans.) Later that week he fed some sheep.
On the last morning of our travels, both kids had just woken up and came to snuggle in bed with us. Family snuggles are not something that happens at home hardly ever, just because Jackson is in his own room. But on this trip we were all in one room. Lily was sitting up next to my head, and then in typical 13 month fashion began to grab my cheek and pull it. Jackson jumped to my rescue moving her hand away “No Lily!” and I was just about to launch in a reprimand about how “we only touch sisters gently” when Jackson leaned into kiss my cheek and then Lily mirrored him and gave me a kiss as well.
It was the best.
Traveling makes memories. Sweet-melt-your-heart memories, proud-of-their-accomplishment memories, later-funny-but-at-the-time-awful memories.
And while I find that holding a baby makes it hard to hold a camera, even just a few pictures on your phone become so precious a few years later to see younger versions of kids interacting with each other and their parents.
Traveling is a lot of work, but it ties us together. It creates shared moments to remember and stories to bring out and reminisce over. So pile the kids on the couch and take a couple hurried pictures.
When we were in North Carolina we were staying with Evan’s childhood best friend Jake whose parents happened to be in town. And for Evan’s birthday I had everyone share some memories of meeting him and something they appreciated about him. It was so special to hear from Jake and his parents some memories of young Evan. And in a few decades I hope that we can trot out some of these stories from our travels about our friend’s children: about spilled soup, about how they made fairy gardens, were obsessed with the best car transporter toy, or ran around chasing bubbles.
And in the meantime, making an effort to see friends every couple of years, even if it’s a big hassle, makes friendships grow, and helps you keep up with people via phone and text and social media in between.
Traveling with toddlers really is worth it.
What are your tales of traveling or hosting toddlers?