ILX Parenting 6: "Put Some Goddamn Pants On Before You Go Outside!" is a thing I say now

we've loved traveling with small kids, to Turkey with our 10 month old, to France and Italy with another 10 month old, all over the USA and Europe with slightly less small but still < 2 year olds. never did the lap baby thing since those were loooong flights. also have never done a "beach week" or a stay-in-one-place vacation, we just move around, travel the same as we do solo but just more slowly. also pretty much never prep, just figure it out on the fly. note: this leads to situations that other parents might consider irresponsible: for example in Cappadocia taking a cab to a remote rock formation without packing enough water, goofing around with the 10 month old on our back on this huge rock filled with little caves (it was so rad). we asked/paid the cab to come back in a couple of hours to get us, or thought we did: we speak almost no Turkish. there was no other way back to Ürgüp, I guess walk 15+ miles? but the cab did come back and everything worked out great.

I suspect moving around, being in a new place each day is the key--otherwise it's like being at home, but without all the distractions you have built up in your own home

toddler vacations worked OK for us, but two boys, 6 and 3, were like a one-way ticket to the nerve-shredder express.

We've never done it. Unlikely we will until she's like... 20.

Years back a friend of mine said she was losing her mind from kids' music so I made her a car playlist of kid-safe (no profanity no innuendo) rock/pop/indie schmindie that was super peppy. Despite her enthusiasm for the project I think she only really likes easy listening and Celtic folk music so she probably made it through one Rezillos and one Jonathan Richman track and was like "NEVER AGAIN" but a few other people have given it good reviews. It was surprisingly difficult though.

My teachers thought I was weird for knowing the words to popular songs of the 1930s and 40s (thanks for the sheet music, Grandma!). I can only return the favor by helping 10-year-olds sing along to Chris Knox, Mama Cass, Bacharach....

We took the boys to Thailand in November. It was actually pretty fun, for the most part. But they're nine now, so much easier than dealing with toddlers. Two little ones at the same time is tough, because there just aren't enough hands/laps, etc. to deal with everything. Maybe take a small solo vacation each to actually get some relaxing in...

We've done a couple of weekend trips, staying in hotels or VRBO places and those have been fine but this was prior to walking and becoming more sentient and opinionated.

We're going to visit all three sets of grandparents sometime in june and I'm just dreading it. I dislike visiting there anyway for a number of reasons, but with the kid it feels so much harder.

It's a minimum of three or four plane trips, some of which require an hour plus of driving at one end or the other as we are going from small town to small town. It's also expensive as hell even with a kid on our lap. Plus it's constant balancing of family time, where everyone is passive aggressive about how much time with the grandkid they get, we are out of our usual routine and sleeping in shitty beds in hot attics and moving every couple of days and it's three timezones away so everyone's sleep is messed up from that as well.

I actually feel kind of sick to my stomach just thinking about it. This is a trip, not a vacation.

flying with young kids is awful, no question about it. also i need to remember that when flying with a child younger than 2 it is ALWAYS worth it to pay for the extra seat unless the kid is like 3 months or younger. we've had way more success buying the extra seat and putting the baby in a car seat than holding the baby on our lap

joygoat that sounds rough, sympathies

we've had to make a number of trips to OH to visit my family lately and i've realized that doing a 12 hour drive is way easier than a 2 hour flight, just easier to pack, we can go at our own pace, we can stop when we want to, even spread the drive over two days

ime flying w kids between the ages of 2-5 is excruciating, because they can't read or otherwise amuse themselves really, and their attention spans are so goddamned short

brutally short, our 12 month old was a nightmare

Just booked our holiday with the small one, we only ever go <2 hour drive away and do self-catering. Happy to leave planes for another time...

joygoat can you get out of it? sounds horrendous.

this kind of scenario is why family/relatives should be forced to come to you imo

xp

If you are ok with letting your kids play with tablets, then plane rides are fine. In fact (depressingly), the plane rides were my kids' favorite part of the Thailand trip because they got to play like 10 hours of Geometry Dash.

joygoat can you get out of it? sounds horrendous.

I could, but my wife really wants to visit and then I'm the asshole who didn't come and visit his family / made his wife fly solo with a toddler.

Been that guy.

We could never have afforded any trips that involved flying when i was a kid (but then again who could back then, planes were pricey in the 80s), but I recall a *lot* of very long car trips. When you live in AU, going anywhere at all involves at least a 3 hour trip and can be days. Dunno how my parents coped - there were 3 of us and I dont imagine the car had aircon.

Feeling a little better today - the hotel is p nice and beachfront and has a great pool area and we just decided to spend the whole AM beaching and lounging around the pool. I bought a bunch of food at a grocery store so we can eat sandwiches and not the overpriced hotel food every bfast and lunch. In the evening we went for a low key dinner and then got gelato and then it was p much time for the kids to sleep. That's kind of the hardest thing - being in one room and having the kids in bed early - I'd probably just rent an Airbnb or something if I did this again but it was a very last minute plan (after having to bail on our original plan). Right now for example id much rather have a drink with H on the grounds but we may just take turns sneaking down for a drink instead.

Adjusted expectations seems like the best way to go with two. With one it felt like we were still the bosses, but now we really have to go on their schedules in order to keep things sane.

actually turned out to be great overall, it just took a little time to recover from the packing and planning and travel, and next time I'll probably make it longer

Potty training has commenced. Pray for us and our rugs.

Once you realise that holidays are just the same old childcare but in a place that's not childproofed and all routine goes out of the window leaving the kids unsettled pain in the arses, I find them much more manageable.

Best most relaxing holiday we had was when Molly had chickenpox - all expectations of doing fun things together went out of the window and we had quality one of one time with them both as Aidan still wanted to go to the pool, which meant that they got on really well together the rest of the time and bickering went out of the window.

We're planning a major relocation next summer - London to York, coinciding with applying for a secondary school for Aidan. The logistics are giving me cold sweats already, not least sorting out a new primary school for them and the whole having to make new friends thing.

Whoa!

post Potty training can be awful. My oldest learned it in a weekend (at my PIL). But Elisabeth steadfastly refused to go on a potty. I was so fed up I pushed her on one while she screamed. It as good after that.

Oh gosh, Vicky, I feel for you! I have Ophelia's high school already sorted and she still has to start sixth grade. It was mostly cause she was bored/unhappy at school so we figured maybe skipping another year. Decided against it and now opting for CLIL (Latin and some subjects taught in English) in two yrs time.

the most relaxing time I've had since the baby was born was when I was at home recovering from an operation and my partner had time off to help out. It was bad enough that I didn't feel bad being off work but OK enough that I felt OK most of the time.

parents of teen children: do you read their tweets?

my teen daughter uses instagram but not twitter; & no, I don't follow her on there

evidently my youngest daughter likes to watch youtube videos of baby ultrasounds.

http://misszoot.com/a-fourth-grader-and-social-media/

My daughter gets REALLY pissed off at anything to do with babies these days! It's weird because a few months ago she was super into the idea of a new baby, inspired by the new baby episodes of Daniel Tiger's neighborhood. And Mrs. Life and I even started talking about it too, throwing the idea around, thinking about if we were ready again. But for the last month or two she'll start growling if her mother or I talk about babies or even see a picture of a baby.

She plays a mother all the time in playtime, where she imagines herself to be an animal. One day she'll be a mama fox, the next day she'll be a mama eagle and sit out in the yard in a nest made out of sticks with an old plastic easter egg underneath of her. But when it comes to human babies, hell no.

the only sensible solution is for you guys to have a baby egret

Do you guys ever pinch yourself that you have kids? I had a two day work trip that was kind of packed, and when I finally got on the plane home I pulled out my phone and started looking at pictures of the fam and was kind of overcome with emotion and wonderment.

Not just kids, but fucking amazing kids. I have fucking amazing kids, as I'm sure all of you do too.

nah my kids are mediocre at best

ok I guess they're sort of adorable
https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7179/26890741881_54c84c0691_b.jpg

otoh last night Judah had some food in his mouth for 2 hours that he refused to swallow. He was just walking around with his mouth full, "I don't like it!", etc. Eventually half an hour after he went to bed and after much arguing and crying and screaming I managed to make him spit it out.

lol

K once held the same lollipop in her hand for literally three hours and forty minutes.

I picked my daughter up from daycare the other day, five or six hours after my wife dropped her off. She immediately reaches into her mouth and hands me a chewed up piece of Trident. The daycare workers had no idea she had been keeping it in there.

haha I've gone to brush Ivy's teeth only to find she'd been keeping a paste of whatever we had for dinner tucked into her cheek like Skoal.

lol

hahaha, our daughter did that a few times with a piece of bacon

My 5yo son loves learning about space, loves planets, moons, constellations, etc. Last night while getting ready for bed he told me that the sun will burn out in 5 billion years, and man did he have a lot of questions about that. Will the earth fall since the sun’s gravity won’t be holding it anymore, will it be cold, how will we read outside in the dark… I got the sense that he doesn’t understand that we won’t be around to witness it, and I didn’t want to bring up something that heavy right before bed. On the other hand I hate to think that he might be having quiet anxiety over how we’re going to handle a sunless world.

just play this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9KKBvWTdMQ

sooo... uh just found out my 7 and 4-year-old searched, on google, for this search term:

naked sex very disgusting

on my computer. i was really thrilled about that obviously. i think i handled it right though. i didn't get mad or tell them off, i asked them what they searched for and what they saw. they were obviously super shy about it and didn't want to say anything. i told them that whatever they saw was not what real sex is like, it's pictures of people who don't actually love each other. that real sex is different. and that pictures like that are for grown-ups and they should not search for things like that again.

and i turned on safe search (duh??!!!!?)

Oh man

My kids dont know how to use google yet but looking forward to it

My kid keeps asking me to enable safari on his iPhone. Nope.