I suppose that readers of Global Thoughts must sit and wonder if I am nuts for traveling as much as we do with the kids and I must admit that sometimes we get frustrated and wonder why the hell we do this. First of all, I have little choice because my parents are in Miami and Karen’s mum is in Australia. I of course get out a bit myself but I don’t have much chance to get out alone with Karen. But you know the Lufthansa advertisement campaign whose slogan is “All for this one moment.” – that’s pretty much what it is for me. You have to get your humor on and have a totally different sense of what you hope to achieve out of such travel and put up with a lot of crap with your pet monsters, but at a certain point you have your daughter dance around and chirp and purr and say “Daddy, I Am Happy!” and that is the moment you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. I particularly enjoy seeing my kids in pretty and constantly stimulating surroundings (if you are at an interesting place) and having the entire day to focus on being a family, doing fun things and living solely for the moment of experience and enjoyment without e-mail, telephone, newspapers and doing mundane things all day long at home such as cleaning up toys, clothes and dishes. (Yes, you still have to do diapers, feedings and baths and that is no small thing but you get better at it as you do more of them and get attuned to being with them all day long and anticipating their needs but the payoff is that after 10 days the kids feel a lot closer to their dad than they do otherwise during the year when the mom is always the one who is around.) The kids get a lot out of seeing all sorts of new things, colors and textures and I am sure that it helps their growth. And when you come back, you have your kid looking at the photos and telling you what she remembered she saw, all the new words she learned, and you hopefully get an 8x10 family photo that sits on the mantle of your living room showing you all on your holiday and it even has all of you looking at the camera and smiling at the same time – a veritable miracle, and it’s not at K-Mart with some phony background either but some pretty scene of nature with mountains, water and sky. These are my favorite things to look at in our house. When life is over, these pictures and memories are all you have left and you can never be sure which trip will be your last one and the last one they got to be with you. So I’m a big fan of this and in the spirit of Global Thoughts, I think that after 2 years of this, I am sharing some suggestions with the proviso that I am told it gets better as they get older and the more you do this, the better you and they become at doing it. Staff at quality resorts tell me that the best behaved kids are those that come with their parents because they know the drill; the ones being shuttled around by nannies are the worst.

Travel Objectives — It was with good reason that I forced Karen and I to have some really great trips during the first year of our marriage. It will probably be sleep away camp summers before we get to do it again. Forget about sightseeing and traveling the way you used to. On the surface, it sounds like hell but then again many people hate family travel because they put up with more misery than they do at home and could probably have better results with some useful advice plus some strategic spending. Forget about running through the airport with only your carry-on luggage; now you are going to check your bags and carry only what you need on board the plane which is quite enough and of a new dimension for those used to being single. Schedules are built around naps. Resorts are much better for all this than cities because at noon you are more likely to be in your room watching your kids sleep but at least here one of you can stay in the room in the dark and the other can go out to something like the spa or just walk around. Figure on having 4-6 hours a day of actual recreational time. Consider that the more you travel, the better you and the kids get at doing it. Elizabeth knew how to deal with airports and airplanes well before she was 2. For our purposes, we avoid time zone changes and stick to resorts in the Eastern US and close by destinations such as Bermuda. We are going to California in September but that will be a 2½ week trip with a few days in the beginning at my brother’s house while they get over jetlag and a Jewish holiday forcing us to stay home a few days when we get back to recover again. A good book of resorts is 100 Best Family Resorts in North America. Temperatures in the 70's are ideal; 80's is hot and 60's already is coolish. We’re not into swimming; they increase the odds of getting sick. Beaches are impossible with strollers; they get stuck in the sand. Walks are the best outdoor activity. If they can walk fine; if not, you push strollers. 

Packing – Work off a list and try to get good at taking only that which you need and lay things out in an organized way when you arrive instead of constantly rummaging through suitcases. One is posted on Global Thoughts. Don’t wait till the day before you leave in case you realize you need to buy stuff. Consider shipping certain items ahead of you via UPS and just buying certain things that you will throw away after the trip. Get a suitcase for each kid but on the way home all the dirty clothes can go into one suitcase. Eagle Creek by Magellan makes a great line of luggage known as Load Warrior – they are very light, sturdy and are great stuffers; they come in a few colors and sizes so that you can easily identify the bags. They are also good as carry-ons if you don’t want to check them. Bring along some books and toys from home. We find that bringing a crib bumper from home also helps with infants as it makes them feel more oriented. Lightweight strollers are the best – Maclaren makes a Volo which is about 8-9 pounds and folds easily for use in taxis and airplanes. When we rent cars, they come with car seats installed (Avis does this; Hertz forces you to install them yourself) so we don’t travel with them except for infants whose seat we use on the airplanes. We bring along pasta, chicken and things we know our kids want to eat at least for the first few days and we don’t hesitate to tell hotel kitchens what to make for us such as fried fish fingers and mashed potatos. Going to a supermarket can fetch you things such as milk, juice, snacks, frozen vegetables, yogurt, paper towels, fruit, and even diapers and wipes so that you don’t have to overpack and have stuff in the room that you know they want. It may be cheaper to go into a Target and buy socks and bibs rather than to worry about laundry if there are no washing machines available.

Airplanes – Spend the extra money and get each kid a seat. Business class is useless with kids anyway. Planes are so full that you’re rarely going to find extra seats and the money and hours spent on a chiropractor undoing 3 hours of having a kid on your lap is more than the price of a ticket. Once the kid is around 2, the DVD player and some videos makes the plane ride much more bearable. The age between 1 and 2 is the worst; the kid won’t stay in the car seat and isn’t ready to amuse himself with the DVD and usually doesn’t want to go to sleep until exhaustion. Bring food and a pillow on board. Buy Buy Baby sells a thing that connects a pacifier to the baby’s clothing; this is great on a plane so it doesn’t keep getting lost. With practice, you get the airport security lane routine down pat; ask them at the entrance to fast-track you for the security check and the pre-boarding when you are traveling with the little kids, and you almost always get to jump the line and go in with the first-class passengers.

Hotels – Consider getting a one or two bedroom suite with doors rather than one hotel room or interconnecting rooms. You want to have crawl space, dining area, refrigerator and microwave, and privacy for the kids and yourself (really more for the kids so that they will sleep because they will walk in on you whenever they are awake) but at the same time be able to know what’s going on in all rooms. You’re going to spend a good amount of time in your room so you better enjoy the place. Cramming a family into a small room is guaranteed to make you wish you were home. A good hotel is worth its weight – you want places to eat on the property with lots of choices, smart concierges, pretty views and activities you can do without having to leave the property, and the odds are that you will never get to the spa because for one thing it is impossible to make reservations for such things when you have kids constantly forcing you to reschedule. Having a playground is good; kids are more interested in swings than most anything else and doing at least one thing a day that they want to do is a good idea. I even like hotels when we visit family; it keeps our kids on their schedules and tends to decrease the odds of them getting sick from their cousins, several of whom are always sick. 

Scheduling on the Ground – Work around the kids. Breakfast buffets are good because they mean everybody starts the day well fed in case you find yourself skimping on lunch and you don’t want to waste a precious hour of your day with kids lunching in a restaurant anyway. You can take “for laters” such as small boxes of cheerios and bananas and fill up the sippy cup with juice and milk. No matter how good the activity, you are not going to enjoy it if the kids are in a bad mood, meaning if they are tired or hungry or sick. So let them nap and get their sleep, diaper changes, feedings and baths so that you can enjoy the snippets you want to enjoy with happy tuned up babies and keep them healthy. Since kids wake you up by 7 if you’re lucky, you can start your day by 9:30 after an early morning walk and breakfast and your only sacrifice is that you didn’t get to sleep late. Clouds are better than full sun with kids outdoors. A resort with a day camp that lets you drop kids off for an hour is wonderful unless you want day camps that have 4 hour sets (we don’t want to dump the kids off during the day but sometimes an hour is very useful as they get to play and we get to take care of things). Good activities are those where you don’t walk too much and can avoid stairs; the ground is paved and level; and they shouldn’t last too long. A trolley tour that is more than 45 minutes won’t work; a horse and carriage ride is nice; and car rides to your activity shouldn’t be more than an hour or so. Best to go to a target destination, see a particular thing such as an observation point and return rather than go to some forest and drive around aimlessly for 2 hours looking at scenery from your car and getting out once in a while to see things from the side of the road. Gardens are tough with kids; they want to pull the flowers and eat everything they see. You only want to be up and around for more than 3-4 hours at a time if you expect to have cranky kids the next day. I tend to see my day built around a morning activity from 9am to noon and 3pm-6pm if the nap is at noon, or from 11am to 1pm and then 3pm-6pm if there are morning and afternoon naps. We know that we have to stop everything at about 5:30 in order to feed them dinner, take baths, and get ready for bed in time for a 7:30 babysitter and then to go to dinner. Following the exact same routine at the end of the day that you have at home is best for assuring that the kids will go to sleep at the proper time. Leave time for little things such as simple walks with your kid one on one (it is great in the morning and it gives your spouse a chance to sleep); they love to go at their own pace and I enjoy watching them take in everything. If you are always worried that you are on the way to something, you are missing something from the journey. 

Evenings – Get a babysitter. It helps restore parent sanity at the end of the day and you deserve a break after spending the day catering after them. It also gives the parents some time to enjoy their holiday and the expense is petty against the travel cost as a whole. Your kid doesn’t want to sit at the dinner table anyway; he or she wants to be in bed by 7. The first time we took her to dinner, by next afternoon she was in total meltdown. We tried traveling with our nanny once and it was a real waste; she wanted a per diem and overtime and felt like she was doing us a favor and it was costing us a fortune to take her along and she had her days free. If you need help during the day, a good resort will hook you up with a nanny there. Here again a resort is good so that you don’t have to waste time getting to and from dinner and looking for things to do. If I had to sit in a hotel room all evening after a whole day, I’d never want to travel. I tried that once and vowed not to do it again. If you are in a good resort or hotel, they will have good babysitters. So far we have only been disappointed once or twice and more than pleased much more often. Elizabeth is asleep by 7:30 and has never yet actually seen a babysitter during a holiday. One day the party will end we know. Generally, we don’t leave the hotel property so the sitter doesn’t have to look far for us and of course there are cellphones.

Photography – Get a professional photographer to get a family portrait. You can’t take such pictures yourselves and nobody else will have the patience to get a picture of you all. This last $150 is the clincher of your holiday; it is the souvenir that winds up on your wall of memories. For us, 9:30 is the hour of power; the kids are awake and energetic after having been fed. The best pictures will be taken in the first 10 minutes so pick your best venue first. You only need one good photo. For our own photos, I shoot lots of digital photos and delete them later. You have to shoot many with little kids to come up with a few good ones. Canon Power Shot has a good camera that shoots very quickly after you hit the shutter button. I also use the video feature a lot instead of carrying a camcorder; the quality is perfectly fine and it is easier to move between camera and video modes using the same piece of small equipment that fits in your pocket. I have two such cameras; my wife holds one in her pocket book or diaper bag as a backup. 

Sounds daunting. When I told Karen that I was writing this column and asked her if she had any advice for traveling with kids, she answered Don’t Bring Them. Every time we go, she tells me that she doesn’t want to do this again and that it’s just not worth it. But we go. Maybe it’s to please me and yes, it’s work, but I really do enjoy these family holidays. Growing up family holidays were traumatic to my brothers (and I remember the day in Moscow where I just got fed up eating Russian-made ice cream sandwiches on the Arbat and put myself in a taxi and went off to Pizza Hut and Baskin Robbins for some real food), but I think that this was because the living conditions, food and itinerary were not ideal, and I have tried to compensate for this by making sure that all of these items take into account the interests of everyone in the family so that holidays work for all. For instance, one fine day in North Carolina last month, Karen wanted to go to Target, a toy store and the Biltmore Gardens, Elizabeth wanted the petting zoo and playground swings and wouldn’t stop reminding me, Jeremy wanted food and diaper and I wanted to visit a hotel that our family stayed at as a kid and this really great bakery. We did all of them. It was a tough day but everyone got what they wanted. 

We were in London a year and half ago; I had a nice time but Karen threatened me with divorce, and the flights in both directions were very tough with a one year old who wouldn’t stay in a seat. The little tyke, so out of place and element, slept only when sprawled atop her mum’s stomach and was so upset that she threw up on her mum’s friend’s living room carpet. So if you want to see Paris, forget about it with little kids. That is, unless you have already seen it so much that you don’t care what you see and you are willing to go long enough to get over jetlag, and then of course by all means go to Paris with them and there are tons of things you can do there with kids that would be fun. I just can’t tell you yet what they might be. The point is that traveling with family means that you are not really going to see places in the sense of sightseeing; you will be lucky if you have the chance to walk around and see your hotel by yourself. What you are hoping for is to be in a pleasant surrounding as a background to look at and spend quality time with your family; anything you get to see as a sight is a bonus. What you get as your reward are memories of the funny things that happen such as the sheep that chased me out of the petting zoo thinking that my pockets were full of milk for them (that’s what Elizabeth remembers as her favorite moment of the trip), the satisfaction of knowing that your kids learned things and experienced them with you (such as going out at night in winter in Bermuda and looking at the twinkling stars – something I can’t do in the cold winter in NY from an apartment building or in summer when it gets dark too late) and the priceless happiness from the feedback you get when the members of your family purr with delight and say that they are happy.

Undoubtedly, 2 kids is more trouble than 1 and I wouldn’t venture to know what you would do if you had to travel with 5 kids. My brother tells me that his family of 7 gets into fist-fights on airplanes and it's not hard to believe considering how much opposition we get to Elizabeth's Elmo DVD videos (not 1/10 as annoying as her crying, I try to assure passengers). And as far as all the nice thoughts I’ve mentioned in the previous paragraph, try to keep them in mind when your plane is sitting on the runway and the choice is between your little monster screaming in your lap or running down the aisle risking the wrath of the flight attendant and of course all the people staring into their blackberries hoping you and your kid would just die and the only thing restraining them is the force of federal law. But hey, getting anywhere is never the part that makes you want to go, even by yourself; it’s being there and remembering it afterward that is the reason you go.

P.S. Send me your thoughts and advice and I’ll include them in a later edition of this article.