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How does travel bring you together as a family?
So far, we’ve travelled with our kids to 7 countries, 11 states and provinces, and all 29 counties in Utah. This may seem overwhelming for just 6 years, but they absolutely love it and often share their adventures with anyone who’ll listen.
They’ve definitely caught the travel bug.
In fact, the other day while driving home from school our oldest son asked Troy if he could go to the doctor. “Why do you want to go to the doctor?” Troy asked. “To get a shot.” my son replied.
You may be wondering, why a shot?
I know I was…
Apparently, he associates vaccinations with going to cool places and spending quality time together as a family. I guess it’s his funny way of telling us he’s ready for another trip. Or maybe that it’s time to spend more time together as a family.
In part 2 we’ll cover what we’ve learned about how travel brings us together as a family.
1. What are your earliest memories?
Take a minute and think about what your earliest memories are.
Some are probably good and some not so much.
All will be things that impacted you in some lasting way.
When I think back to the first thing I can remember and I literally mean the earliest memory of my life. It’s an event that happened while camping. My mom thinks I was about 3.
I can remember sitting around the campfire and seeing a flying squirrel. I can recall so clearly how desperate I was to have that flying squirrel. While I don’t know how many times I must have asked my dad and his friend to catch it for me, I do remember them chasing it around with an empty beer box.
It’s a ridiculous request, but at 3 it probably seemed totally reasonable. I don’t know if they ever caught it, but I do know that at some point the squirrel ran up a tree and came flying out of it straight for us. Everyone ducked to take cover. Probably not surprisingly, I’m still freaked out by things flying at my head.
My mom remembers this night as well, but for a completely different reason. My innocent request turned the night into chaos. It turns out that when the squirrel ran up the tree our dog had been in hot pursuit. The squirrel went up the tree with such speed that Con didn’t have time to stop. He hit the tree so hard he knocked himself out. Quite a memorable night for everyone! Con was okay once he came to.
So why are our earliest memories often steeped in vacation?
Vacation frees us from the mundane of everyday life. Our experiences feel richer and more memorable when they happen in new and exciting locations. These experiences seem to imprint on us more than the things we routinely experience. Listening to the experiences my children recall from our trips often reminds me of this.
Having children has taught us that while we can’t make sure every memory they have is happy; we can create opportunities for happy, long-lasting family memories. We spend a lot of time talking to the kids about what we’ll see and do and what they might like to see and do to increase their engagement while we’re away.
The lesson: Vacation creates early and long-lasting memories. You might be surprised by what they are.
2. How does travel help you bond as a family?
When we are at home our lives are full on and chaotic. Between work, school, home renovations, sports, gardening, etc we’re busy most of the time.
Troy and I started doing these things long before we had kids. Since we do these projects together and love spending time together vacation felt more like an extension of everyday life. We enjoyed being together and creating new memories in new places, but it wasn’t completely different from what our normal life felt like.
The experiences were of course completely different, but spending quality time together wasn’t.
Post kids, Troy and I still do most of these things together, but we don’t necessarily involve them. In fairness, they’ve been known to weed out my flowers but leave the dandelions and write with permanent marker on the walls because they saw us marking lines for cabinets.
Now that we have kids, the time we get to spend together as a family free from distractions is even more precious. When we are outside our home world we are able to focus on each other. At home we’ll try to have a lazy week-end and hang out together, but inevitably something will come up whether it’s work calls, grocery shopping, bills, cleaning just this one thing…. Getting away from home allows us to spend time together in a really meaningful way.
We recently went to Fremont Indian State Park for one of those awesome week-ends where we are totally off the grid. Since we had no choice but to spend quality time together and enjoy each other’s company we spent the week-end relaxing and bonding.
While we were there, we went on several hikes with the kids where The Big Guy acted as our tour guide, played with the Goob on the bikes, and went on a hunt for scorpions. At night we had a campfire, roasted marshmallows and had a lot of fun talking and joking.
The kids absolutely love this one on one time and refer to it as having a mommy and daddy day.
How fun is that? They’ve actually named the experience of having our undivided attention. For me it stresses the importance of this time together as a family free from distractions.
The lesson: Time together free of distractions creates close bonds of togetherness.
3. How does travel teach you about empathy?
When planning trips before we had kids it was reasonable to plan activities that either Troy would enjoy, I would enjoy, or we both loved to do. It was pretty rare that if there was something that one of us really wanted to do, we just wouldn’t do it period.
Travel is about give and take. However…
When you add toddlers to the mix they aren’t always super reasonable about doing things they don’t want to do.
Our trip to Japan with the boys aged 1 and 3 really enforced this lesson.
We arrived in Japan in the afternoon. The kids were so tired from being cooped up in an airplane for over 14 hours they just wanted to play. We only had 3 days in Tokyo; far less time than needed to do the city any justice. As a result of being overtired and jetlagged, their patience wasn’t exactly top notch.
After some debate over having a really slow day to let them acclimatize to the new time zone or just keep going; we decided to take advantage of all the time we had. We boarded one of the trains and did a walking tour of the downtown district and royal gardens even though they would have preferred to play in our Air BNB.
While there were several melt downs that day, we still summed the day up as a success. We had really wanted to tour these sites and if we hadn’t have gone that day, we wouldn’t have gone at all. We got to see some new things and everyone tried real sushi! Overall, it turned out to be a good decision in spite of the trade-offs.
We’ve had other times where we chose to do something that we were on the fence about and totally regretted it. And other times where we chose not to visit a site or changed plans to suit the kids and were completely happy about it. In fact, we went to Disneyland in Tokyo instead of seeing more temples and it was one of the best decisions we made on that trip.
On vacation we also try to plan something every day that they’ll enjoy. As a result, we’ve been to more parks and McDonalds in the past 3-4 years than we had in the previous 10 combined! We find it gives them something to look forward to, especially if they’re doing something that they find boring.
Having kids has really forced us to think about what we’ve chosen to do and why we’ve chosen to do it.
If we are going to spend the day with a grumpy kid, it had better be for something that we couldn’t leave without seeing or doing rather than something that just ticks a box.
The lesson: While you don’t have to give up the things you love just because you have kids, you do need to clearly define the risks and rewards.
