Day 222

“Mom, Mom, MOM, MOM!”  

“What Kayla?”, I said slightly preoccupied as I tried to navigate my way out of the enormous airport parking lot.

“I forgot my backpack.”

And there it was, right where she left it.

Ah yes, the long and whining road of traveling with children is usually not without its bumps.  Although, I have found that each year the journey gets a bit easier.  And that is usually commensurate with the diminishing amount of gear one has to drag along.

When my oldest was about a year, I took her to meet up with my husband who was working in Rome for a period of time.  I studied and prepared.  In spite of my planning, the trip did not start off well when somewhere over the Atlantic, I opened my carry-on and discovered the lid had worked its way off of her specially prepared organic whole milk cradled in an insulated container and had been sucked up by the “three plus layers of absorbency” of her diaper stash rendering them useless and me diaper-less for the duration of the plane ride.

I swore loudly and unabashedly, but in my defense, the baby was asleep.  However, I did get a bit of an eyebrow raise from the kindly elderly lady next to me.  In a later conversation, I found she was a Catholic nun on her way to the Vatican, but again, in my defense, she was in street clothes.

So, traveling with school age children brings with it a different set of problems,  particularly when you truly need to pack all the essentials because you can’t dash out to buy a hoodie with the resort logo on it because someone is FREEEEEeeeeezzzzing.

So, I made a list and even checked the weather.  I probably even over packed, but I wanted to be prepared.  And, really the children were pretty well set.  I had to wash my workout clothes in the sink and hang them to dry, but that was an acceptable deviation to me.

Now, if we could just hang on to our bags.