Traveling with Twins: the Good

Lest you think the whole trip was filled with crying and wailing, here are some highlights from our two weeks in Oregon.

Flying
We flew Southwest, which I haven't flown in more than a decade. They have an "open seating" policy - you can sit in any open seat when you board. When you're traveling with children, you get to board fairly early in the process, and then you hope that whoever sits by you chooses the seat because they like (or at least don't mind) babies. We had friendly seat neighbors on all the flights plus very helpful flight attendants. One the last leg home, the guy sitting by Baby A and me was just over the moon about A and all his antics. He told me about his flight saga of getting delayed and rerouted then said it was all worth it to get to meet our twins. Aww :)

Visiting Family
Living so far away from family is tough. It was lovely to spend a good chunk of time with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. They all were on cloud nine to hang out with the babies, and the babies seemed to like them, too. It was especially fun when DF's mom, aunt, brother, brother's girlfriend, and girlfriend's mom came down for a few days. Lots of laughter!

Catching up with Friends
The boys got to have some play dates with friends' kids, which was pretty fun. It's always nice to visit people who have known you for a long time. Nothing against my new Southern friends, of course! Make new friends and keep the old.

Not Having a Job
This is the first summer in six years that I've been unemployed, and I've got to say, it's glorious. My previous job was super busy in the summer season. I was never able to take more than a day or two off at a time. Even if I was on "vacation" or it was a weekend, I still had to be on-call, and I always got called. I very clearly remember being at a family reunion campout a few years back, standing under some trees early one morning, discussing the case of an exchange student with mumps while my relatives impatiently waited for me to get back to cooking the bacon!

Getting Some Breaks to Be an Adult
With all the extra hands on deck, I did get to relax sometimes. DF and I even got to go out by ourselves once. Whoa! We also hung out with my sister at her hipster downtown loft, and she introduced us to some of the city's new, cool spots. Incidentally, she's also blogging about her exciting life now. Check it out!

Good Food & Drink
Gotta love the Northwestern cuisine and beverage options.

Coastal Living
One of my parents' friends gave us a good deal on a beach house on the Central OR coast. We spent 3 days there early in the trip, and it was exactly what I needed to relax and reset my brain from the stress of travel. Living in Memphis, I feel so landlocked. (The Mississippi River is nice and all, but it's no ocean!) I loved being able to breathe the sea breezes and watch the sun set behind the waves.

Enjoying the Scenery & Weather
I loved seeing all the rolling hills and soaking up the non-humid sunshine of the Willamette Valley!

Traveling with Twins: a Family Trip, Not a Vacation

Yesterday, another mom told me that when you travel with kids, you should call it a "family trip" rather than a vacation because it sets your expectations accordingly. Good advice! I don't think I was mentally prepared for what traveling with babies is really like. Let me try to explain it for those of you who are thinking of having kids, or whose kids are all grown up now and you've romanticized their infanthood...

Life at Home

We have our routines and schedules pretty much set. There's slight daily variation, but for the most part, we do the same things over and over. The boys (and parents!) are used to it. I have all their gear handy and know where it is. I have a plan for what to feed them and when. Nap and bedtimes are predictable. It's kind of boring at times, but since the alternative seems to involve a lot of screaming, I have accepted that this phase of life just comes with a certain amount of boredom.

Life on the Road

When you travel with kids, you have to do all of your regular parent stuff + deal with lots of changes that throw the kids off. Maybe it's partly our fault for keeping them on such a structured schedule at home. It's hard to learn to be flexible and adaptable!

On the one hand, it was nice to have extra adults around to assist in baby duty. Grandma and Grandpa were eager to spend time with the babies, and we also had lots of other visitors and admirers. But, the boys took some time to warm up to all these different faces. So that meant DF and I were doing extra work to keep the boys calm and feeling safe when they got overwhelmed by too many people. Baby A especially is picky about who he'll allow to feed him a bottle, and they were both sick at the start of the trip so were extra clingy to Mom and Dad. 

We visited several different homes on the trip, none of which housed small children usually. So, DF and I were constantly chasing babies around, keeping them from pulling on cords, ripping up/eating paper, and chewing on whatever they could find on the floor. Great Grandma's house was like a minefield of baby disasters waiting to happen. We wound up spending lots of time outside with them where they ate grass, but that seemed better than ingesting the straight pins I found in the carpet...

It was hard for them to sleep in new environments. I can't really fault them for that, as I also have a hard time sleeping in a new place. Unfortunately, their only way to express their concerns is by screeching/fussing/thrashing about. I wish they could understand my soothing words. Instead, we spent many nights holding not-sleeping babies. On the bright side, though, by the end of the trip they were doing a lot better and not waking up nearly as much. Yay for adapting!

Feeding them was tricky, too. I'm used to having a stash of baby-appropriate foods in my fridge and cupboard so when meal time rolls around, I'm ready to go. On the road, I had to plan ahead a lot more, but I wasn't very good at it. So the boys wound up eating a lot of bread/Cheerios. They love carbs and didn't complain, but I felt that I should've been feeding them a more balanced diet!

Now, on the positive side, I think that by interacting with so many new people, they got over some of the shyness and hesitancy around strangers that they had been exhibiting before the trip, particularly A. Baby B has always been a little more friendly, and he seemed to enjoy all the extra attention. They got to play with new toys and developed some new skills, like clapping their hands. I was also glad they were able to spend more time outside. The weather in Oregon was perfectly lovely, and my parents have a nice front and back yard. The boys got to eat fresh raspberries off the bush (a big hit!), play with wind chimes, go on lots of walks, play at parks, and meet some neighbor dogs. We found out they really like animals! Here in Memphis, it has been so hot and sweltering that we hardly spend any time outside. I think they liked the change of pace. 

A Peaceful Sunset on the Oregon coast

Traveling with Twins

We recently returned from two weeks in Oregon with the babies. Wow. Traveling with kids is a whole new ballgame, that's for sure! In this post, I'll focus on the logistics of travel itself. I'll warn you now, it's mostly a lot of whining! I sure hope that traveling with kids becomes easier in the future.

Before Kids
I used to travel for work all the time, so I had a pretty good mental packing list when it came to personal trips. DF and I would wait till the night before or morning of our trip to throw some stuff in our carry-on bags, call a taxi, and arrive at the airport no more than 90 minutes before our flight. On the plane, we'd play on our phones, watch movies if provided, read books, nap, eat snacks, and generally relax. Upon arrival at our destination, we'd either use public transportation or pick up our rental car and head off for adventures. Maybe we'd be a little tired if we had to get up early for the flight, but we caught up on sleep within a day or two of being footloose and fancy free.

With Kids
I started fretting about flying with the babies before we even bought tickets for this trip. About 3 months before departure, I created an overly-detailed Google spreadsheet for everything we could possibly need (including items to pack, buy in advance and ship, and borrow or buy in Oregon), which probably resulted in stressing my parents out as I convinced them to drive all over the Willamette Valley borrowing baby goods.

A week before we were scheduled to leave, both babies (of course) came down with colds. They kept waking up at night and needing me to snuff out their noses. Then one night, A screamed for quite awhile, so I took them both to the doctor in the morning to discover A had an ear infection. B's ears looked fine, but he was still grouchy. When travel day arrived, then, both DF and I were already exhausted from a week of sleep deprivation and cranky, sick, teething babies.

We managed to fit our copious amounts of gear into 3 checked bags and 3 carry-ons, plus our two infant carrier car seats. We almost forgot the snap-n-go folding stroller, but luckily the taxi had only driven about a mile away from our house when I remembered it! We arrived at the airport two hours early and had to wait in line to check our bags. I don't recall the last time I had checked luggage!!

Going through security was rather chaotic. There were no TSA personnel on the "load your stuff" side of the screening zone to tell us what to do with our carseats and stroller, so we just sort of stood there looking confused until someone finally pointed us in the right direction. Once through security, we had to buy some bottled water so we could make the babies' bottles while traveling. We also attempted to feed ourselves, semi-successfully. I didn't really want the boys to crawl around the waiting area eating all the crumbs and dirt they found on the floor, but that meant we each had to hold one, and they weren't super happy about being constrained.

We didn't purchase seats on the plane for the babies (so expensive!) but got lucky on leg #1 of travel (Memphis-Houston) that there were unoccupied seats, so we got to bring their carseats on the plane. Yay, babies napping in flight! We weren't so fortunate on leg #2, the four-hour jaunt. Four hours of holding a squirming baby who refuses to nap. Yeah, that's about as fun as it sounds. I think they were too distracted by all the people who wanted to stop and talk to/make faces at them. I mean, it was nice that the other passengers were being friendly, but they wound the kids up too much to sleep! I just kept shoving Cheerios in the boys' mouths. It was extra tricky because the four of us couldn't all sit in the same row - there is only one extra oxygen mask per 3-seat row, so only one lap baby is allowed. We wound up sitting across the aisle from each other. We survived (barely).

Upon arrival at PDX, we found out that Southwest had lost our luggage. I don't know how they managed to do that because we were on the same plane all the way from Memphis! Apparently someone took our bags off the plane when they shouldn't have. Argh! And then there were a series of car accidents causing big delays on the highway, so a usually 1.25 hour drive took nearly 2.5 hours. We were all cranky and exhausted by the time we got to Grandma and Grandpa's house. Well, maybe not DF because he has the mental fortitude to decide not to be cranky, but the other 3 of us aren't as capable of controlling our emotions :)

Where is our luggage??

Predictably, I had packed the babies' white noise sound machine and sleep sacks in one of the lost suitcases. So, we all had another long and sleepless night as they had none of their usual sleeping comforts, besides pacifiers. The luggage was delivered to my parents house early the next morning. Hooray, things are looking up!