I was just reflecting today how much easier it is to travel with a toddler than an infant. Everyone says infants are easier, but in my opinion, they are wrong, wrong, wrong. First of all, it is very difficult to do anything when your child must be fed every two hours. It is debatable whether this is harder or easier if you are BFing versus formula feeding, but in the former case, you can’t feed your child while your vehicle is in motion, which means you must stop every 1.5 hours or so. In addition, L never nursed as well away from the comforts of home, so she’d develop a bit of a food deficit which was worrisome since we always worried about her weight and also was bound to end in crankiness.
Now that L is a toddler, she enjoys crawling around to explore this and that and even has some small modicum of sense around not falling off things. She is a much, much better sleeper than she used to be (even if she still wakes us up before 7), and it’s so much easier to consider travel when you are not sleep-deprived. We’d originally talked about going to Iceland last year (closest destination to Seattle outside the US other than Japan and maybe Mexico) but the thought of 10 days without sleep in Iceland just did not seem enjoyable so we skipped it. Maybe we should have gone to Hawaii. We did go on three small trips – camping in Mt. Rainier, the San Juan Islands, and the beach in Oregon. Each was enjoyable but also challenging in its own way.
This picture really amuses me: