Behind-the-Scenes of Traveling with a Baby

now that i’m posting once a week, i have this internal struggling with creating high-value content versus sharing life updates. moving from posting three times a week (for YEARS) to once a week has felt like when you are on a road trip, you drank all your water/coffee/tea/slurpees and you see that a rest stop is only a mile away. ah, sweet, manageable relief.

while i shared last week about 7 tips for traveling overseas with a baby, i want to give you some behind-the-scene experiences and thoughts from our two week adventure in the united kingdom! i so don’t want to feed into that ‘only share the highlight reels of life’ type person. that does no one any good.

<side tangent>

i hope you had a wonderful 4th of july! our besties from portland (aka malison) flew in to play for a long weekend! even better? we kept it from ravery and they surprised him by jumping out of my mom’s trunk! hopefully you saw the epic video on my instagram!

<end tangent>

okay, back to some less-than-glamorous adventures overseas.

the first plane ride – baaaad. we did not get a bassinet for atlas to sleep in on our red out to london (despite efforts of trying). after 3 hours of squirming, she finally feel asleep across our knees. can you imagine trying to sleep while your body is spread across knobbly knees?! can you imagine trying to sleep with a squirming baby on said knobbly knees?! it was pretty rough.

many hotel injuries

poor atlas had quite a few incidents in our 9 different hotel rooms. during our trip, she had just learned how to pull herself up on things so her legs were still wobbly and balance not so great. she had her first bloody nose after falling down from holding on a chair and smacking her face on the stand of the chair. so so sad. she also got fingers pinched in the door, hit her chin on a table and somehow got skin pinched by her eye in a hotel crib (this is still a mystery to me).

diaper blowouts

if you are not a parent, then this will probably exceedingly gross you out but parents know that blowouts are a part of a baby’s life. they are horrible. sometimes parents rock/paper/scissor for who has to change the explosion.

well, we were out to a nice dinner and atlas hadn’t pooped in 2 days (very rare and means impending doom when it does happen). she was enjoying some puree and her bottle while we were sharing a large glass of wine celebrating the end of a successful speaking tour. we knew the food was coming soon so we put her in her highchair. 

moments before our food was due out, there was significant grunting and various other noises from her while in the highchair. thankfully, we didn’t have anyone super close to us at nearby tables. ravery lost the rock/paper/scissors.

i chugged our wine and asked our waiters to box up our food so i could walk it back to our hotel (next door). we ate our dinner in a poopy-smelling hotel room on the floor while atlas fussed herself to sleep. #glamorous

another blowout story: to get between cities, the client booked a variety of trains, planes and drivers. we were in the midst of a 3 hour road trip and everyone was so ready to be out of the car. atlas had yet another blow out but we still had 45 more minutes in the car with really no where to pull over. both her and her carseat had a bath once we arrived to the hotel. thank goodness for sensory adaptation.

missing out on normal travel adventures

as much fun as it was to travel overseas with atlas for the first time, it definitely took some adjusting. ravery and i are used to hitting it hard when we travel so we can experience as much as possible of a new place and new culture. when you become a parent, you quickly learn how important sleep is for the baby (and yourselves but that’s another story). as much as we wanted to pop her in a stroller and hit the town, we knew it would be best for her – and then us – for her to be asleep by 8pm there.

we often got stuck in this go-between of ‘it’s 30 minutes until bed time but we can’t possibly all stay in the hotel room and stay sane.’ this resulted in watching atlas crawl in the lobbies of hotels or all over furniture. really i wanted to be out finding hole-in-the-wall bars and staying up too late.

full time mom-ing

i am impressed with women (and men) who find immense satisfaction from staying home with their kids. i believe it’s something you are wired with and this trip helped me come to terms that i’m not wired that way. since ravery had 6 keynotes through the U.K., i went into the trip knowing i wouldn’t be working on my projects or our business. in the beginning of the trip, it was manageable and fun to focus all of my energy on atlas. by the end, i needed my brain to be doing other things that didn’t involve my identity of ‘mom.’ i itched for it.

i actually found this realization very exciting because postpartum depression robbed me of itching for anything.

despite some of the mishaps and less than fun times, i am grateful we can travel as a family (even if it means more time in a hotel room than exploring at the moment).