Its probably clear we love to travel with our kids, nothing makes us happier than a family vacation. But let’s be honest….sometimes travelling with kids can be dreadful. We have gone through all of the situations you don’t want to get into when travelling with kids. Sometimes you can shoot yourself for wanting to travel with young kids. To make sure you don’t run into the same situations, or are able to handle them better if you do run into them, we have written down our own TOP 5 Nightmares on our family vacation.
Sit back and enjoy…..
1. Crying kids (or kids with a tantrum) on a flight
OMG.. I guess every parent, who plans a longhaul flight secretly asks herself many questions: how do I entertain my baby on board? How do I make sure he won’t cry? How do I make sure his ears won’t hurt? And so on. You name it and most parents have had that question spinning through their mind before taking of travelling.
Our advice: loosen up the rules. You are the one who wants to explore the world, deciding your baby has to spend the next 8 hours in a narrow steel tube. Give them some slack. The reason our kids love to fly, is mainly because they can watch the Ipad as long as they want and are allowed to eat as much crackers as they want to.
If you relax, they relax. As you only loosen up the rules during the flight, the damage in parenting will be limited ;).
2. Kids who don’t want to eat abroad
Unfortunately our kids are really bad eaters. Even after reading several parenting books, bringing all the theories into practise, our kids and dinner still isn’t the best combination. How do we make sure they eat a nutritious dinner on our family vacation? The answer: we don’t really.
After spending several hours looking for peanut butter in Thailand, we now always pack a jar when we go abroad. Floris lived on peanut butter, bananas and cucumbers in Thailand for three weeks. Not really the nutritious meal we wanted him to eat. To make sure he wouldn’t miss out on the necessary vitamins and minerals we brought multivitamin supplements with us as well.
When travelling the USA the kids didn’t eat dinner as well. As we travelled with a camper having a fully equipped kitchen I prepared them a home cooked “Dutch meal” several times as week.
3. Jetlagged kids who don’t want to sleep at night
No good! Flying east the kids don’t have a huge jetlag. They go to bed a little later and wake up later in the morning as well. Flying to the west is a whole different story. The kids go to bed normal bedtime and wake up about 04:00 AM for about a week. Not much we can do about that.
You could try to adjust a little to the new timezone already back home or in the plane. Make sure you always follow the new time zone straight away after arrival. If the kids have trouble sleeping at night, try to keep them in bed to rest. Sometimes we let our kids watch the Ipad for a while at night, hoping they will doze off again and let’s be honest we can use the extra hour of sleep as well.
4. Kids who don’t want to walk anymore
Yes I know, this sounds quiet funny, but in reality it isn’t. We have been here lots of times. Maybe because of the jet lag, new environment or something totally different, but our kids have repeatedly refused to walk when we just arrived at a destination. What do you do? A. Don’t give in! B. Its your holiday, you want to “move” to see the place and don’t want to sit on the floor next to your “I refuse to walk baby”.
We always go for A. first. At moments when we are in a hurry (catching a plane or boat) we always make sure we carry a stroller or kids carrier with us, preventing a fight with the little one. This always only lasts one or two days, after this time they don’t want anything else but run around by themselves.
5. Sick children, worst of all
Somehow our kids get ill on lots of our family vacations. We, ourselves, have been to quite some hospitals abroad as well. Therefore we can tell you, from our own experience, the hospitals in Bangkok, Las Vegas, Cairns and Koh Samui are really good, the hospital in Vietnam was very bad.
Of course we hope you won’t have to visit a hospital during your family vacation ever, not for you and for sure not for the kids. Nevertheless it’s always wise to check your health and/or travel insurance coverage for medical cost abroad, before you leave. We have visited the ER in Vegas with Lotte on our last trip to the USA, after only 5 mins in, we had to pay € 1.500,-
If you ever have to visit a hospital abroad, especially in not “first world” countries, make sure you choose a private clinic with, preferably, english speaking doctors. If language happens to be a barrier, use Google translate or call your doctor back home as most medicine have universal latin names.
Of course we hope you will never experience one of the “nightmares” in our TOP 5 on your family vacation. If you unfortunately do, we hope our experiences and tips can help you. To end this blog on a happy note: despite the experiences mentioned above, we still had and have amazing family vacations with our kids!
Do you recognize our TOP 5 “nightmares”? Or did you run into totally different things? Let us know, we love to hear them.
Waiting room Samui Hospital
Lotte in Samui hospital
Floris lives on tea and bread
Grumpy Floris during the flight
