Kindle Edition
Amazon
Items May Have Shifted
Category:
Parenting
ISBN-10: 9780995166608
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 146
Copyright: May 22, 2016
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
All you need is a handful of items from the dollar store to successfully travel with a small child. Patience, imagination, and a sense of humor are in aisle 8.
Believe it or not, infants used to be stowed in the overhead compartments on airplanes. Now, you just need a handful of things to successfully travel with a baby or toddler (even twins), and one of them is duct tape.
Combining tested guerilla tactics with scholarly research, Items May Have Shifted: How to Travel With Your Baby or Toddler offers guidance on everything from altitude sickness to zoo hazards for the under 5 set.
This guide will help you
• Develop goodwill on an airplane with a crying baby
• Use the B STUPID packing list
• Get a picky toddler to eat unidentifiable food
• Unpack your emotional baggage
• Childproof a hotel room with no equipment
• Decide when to whine and when to wine
Chapters include: Packing and Hacking, Flying, Accommodation, Eating on the Go, Health and Safety, and more. Items May Have Shifted: How to Travel With Your Baby or Toddler also offers links to additional resources for readers.
How is this book different from other “travel with baby” guides?
• MacGyver approach to common sense (you would be surprised what you can do with a shoelace, duct tape, pipe cleaners, and a sock)
• Doing the maximum with the minimum supplies
• Supported by scholarly research, including medical journals
Excerpt
Emotional baggage
Fear, shame, guilt, indecision, frustration, regret, exasperation all take up very little room in your luggage but can weigh you down immeasurably on a trip (or just in life in general). It seems as though once you have a child, you second-guess everything in a way you never did before.
Decisions about putting your kids in daycare, sunhats, music lessons, designer clothes (just don’t do it) all take on a mythic importance though a similar decision for yourself does not. I can almost guarantee that your parents did not obsess about these things either. But it’s very difficult to contain those worries, especially in a society where we feel as though everyone is watching us.
For a brief time I put cute leashes on my toddler twins. Sorry, safety harnesses. Yes, the same kind of contraption that I viewed with pity and contempt before having two children. But those children had speed, agility, and the total lack of impulse control and listening skills to prevent them from running out into traffic. At the same time. In different directions.
So, given the choice between the shame and guilt of strapping a monkey tail backpack leash on them, or doing inadequate risk management and having them seriously injured, I chose to be the injured party myself. The experiment didn’t last long. Mayhem just sat down at the first sign of resistance, and Destruction was fascinated by his puppy tail, and chased himself into dizzy circles.
Not ready to give up on some kind of restraint system while in places like airports, I once hooked each end of a bungee cord to the boys’ belt loops. So if they tried to run too far away (especially from each other), they snapped back. Yes, I got some weird looks. But it only took one child face-planting and being briefly dragged through the terminal by his brother for all of us to learn from that experiment. Next I hooked the bungee cord to me, for at least long enough for my husband to inform me that I had attachment issues.
Taking children on vacation feels like a spectator sport. But if every person around you were wasting their time judging your parenting choices, they would be too busy to enjoy their own trip. And it’s very likely that they think you are assessing their actions as well. It’s like being self-conscious at the beach. Everyone is worried about how they look. Just let it go. Aim for progress, not perfection. Your travel companions will thank you.
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