Travel with our Son - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

My wife and I recently took our 4 year old son to London. We received a lot of advice - most of it "oh, don't take a kid on a trip like that". I will say that I'm very glad that we did bring him - we had a lot of fun, and it was great to let him see something different. And it really gave us a perspective that we didn't have before on our Son. It also gave us some ideas of what we did well, and what we would do differently next time.

It was also very interesting, because this was our second trip to London in the past two years. Last time we went, we didn't take Connor - it was just the adults - so it gave us an interesting chance to contrast the two trips and really try and think about what traveling with a child means.

So thats why I'm writing this post. To let you know about our experiences traveling with our 4 year old.

The Good

These were things that we were worried about - but we really didn't need to. They worked out well, and I'd have no problem doing them again.

Flights

My wife and I were horrified that Connor would be a bear on the plane. We had a long flight - 1.5 hours from Boston to Washington DC, a long layover, and then another 6 hours overnight to London. We arrived in London the following morning at 6am.

On the way back we went through Chicago - and it was 8 hours, 3 hours, 2 hours.

Amazingly this part of the trip really wasn't a problem. We told Connor what to expect - and things went pretty much to plan. We packed a videogame for him (the Leapster) - along with a new game, and some music he liked on my iPod. We also had some snacks, and a few cars and planes for him to play with.

That kept him busy the whole flight. No problems at all. He slept on both flights, and things were good.

Getting Around

Getting from point A to point B was one of our worries. We brought a stroller just in case we needed it - or he really wouldn't walk. With a couple of exceptions getting around was ok. We actually didn't use the stroller at all - actually we accidentally left it at the hotel in London.

Connor love the Tube. So taking public transit was one of his favorite things to do. Megan and I liked it less than him. In fact there were times we wanted to try and take a taxi, but ended up on the tube because he wanted to so much.

If you've never been to London, they don't have an "ADA" act (or equilivant) for the old buildings. And everything's old. So in a lot of cases the stroller would have been a bigger pain than just walking and/or putting him on my shoulders.

Jetlag

I've done a lot of travel, so I have my own way of dealing with Jetlag. It worked just fine for Connor. When we took off we changed our clocks. The real key was to make sure that we all stayed up until real bedtime (in this case 10pm) every day - so we were tired. And we didn't nap too much on the first day. That let us adjust pretty easily.

I think Meg and I were hit harder than Connor.

The "Bad"

These are things that we did that we could have planned better - but we didn't think would be problems.

Eating

Typically our son isn't a picky eater (for a 4 year old). In the US we never really have a problem finding him food. He'll eat Mexican, Chinese, Italian, American, Japanese - pretty much anything around here. However he had never been exposed to typical British food - and getting him to try something new can sometimes be a challenge.

Well, breakfasts started the difficulty. Bacon and sausage was different - there were no pancakes or french toast or waffles, the eggs were a little runny - everything was just a little off. So he had ham and toast for breakfast.

By the end of the week he enjoyed Tea - which is what we would do for lunch. He enjoyed the pastries and scones and even the ham sandwiches.

But dinner was tough. Everything was a little different - and he wouldn't bend - he was tired and wanted something normal.

So he ended up having lots of deserts, cookies and chocolate all week - because we didn't have his typical snacks or dinner. We got through the week, but I think that was a big part of the one Ugly moment we had - the highs and lows of sugar.

The only time that dinner was what we expected was when we went to Giraffe on the recommendation of on of the "London for Kids" books that we got. That was great. They had a kids menu, and a grown-up menu, and it was something that he was used to - I can't tell you how much it helped having a placemat and crayons for coloring at dinner. We even talked about bringing those ourself in the future.

Playtime

This wasn't really "bad", but it was something we didn't think about - but we should have. We ended up spending quite a bit of time just having "playtime".

One time it was a playground in the park, another time it was running around through the leaves in Hyde Park, and often it was playing with toys in our hotel room.

I think that one of the reasons things went so well for is is that we did spend at least a few hours a day playing and relaxing.

Museums

Museums didn't work out well. Connor was just not interested. We tried the Museum of London and the Mews at Buckingham Palace. These things are just BORING for a 4 year old.

The Ugly

We only had one "ugly" moment. The day before we left I think we pushed Connor's patience a little too far. We took him to Harrod's (a huge department store), and tried to shop with him - for things that we wanted.

Normally we can do this in a mall, and we can keep him busy, but I think the whole week of traveling just had him a little outside his comfort zone.

So we had a complete meltdown.

Now - if this was at home we could drag him to the car, and ride home with him screaming - but we could yell or whatever - and then get home to our house - where noone was watching.

But on Vacation - we could either take public transit (seems like a bad idea with a kid throwing a fit) - or a taxi (still not great, but better) - and then get to the hotel - where the doorman and the lobby staff can hear him say "I never get to eat - I'm so hungry" (the fit was over a piece of chocolate) - making the "walk of shame" that much worse.

When we returned later - we took a new tact. Realizing that we may have been pushing his patience a little too far, we instead took him up to the toy department and one of us stayed with him while he shopped - and we took turns looking for things in the store. For the couple of things we wanted to go together for we just would all go, and then come right back to toys.

Things like shopping that normally would test his patience were just a bad idea in the normal way.

Keeping him distracted worked great, and will definitely be in our arsenal next time.

In conclusion

The trip to London was great. We really enjoyed (other than the meltdown) Connor's company. It was fun to see his perspective on things - seeing things that we already had seen with a kids perspective was really cool - and I think we had a lot of fun as a family.

There are a few things I would do differently next time - but I would definitely do it again:

• Upon arrival, I would buy a bunch of snacks to take with us during the day - healthy ones that he would like and we could stave off the sugar binges


• When shopping, I would have tried to focus more around what he wanted to do - and try the one parent shopping at a time trick - even though its not exactly what we would have wanted as adults - it would have been better than our ugly moment


• I think overall we would have tried to eat at least one more night at a restaurant with a kids menu. We only did one night, and I think having the kid-friendly atmosphere would have been great and helped made him feel more like home one more day.

More on Sharing...

For those of you who actually read this blog, you may have seen my post on Sharing News Articles. It seemed like I had things going pretty well.

I could click on an article from my RSS reader and share it, or add a bookmark that was shared - and have them all published from one URL.

There was a comment about the fact that there are entire systems made for this - http://www.tumblr.com/ was mentioned.

Then I noticed that Paul's shares (the guy who actually figured this out - and never wrote it up) were coming up with comments and excerpts all of a sudden. So I asked him what he was doing. In the usual google way, they added another service - Shared Stuff.

Like tumblr it was made for sharing things. I still like the convenience of being able to just click in google reader, but now I can add comments too. Because of the setup that I described in my previous post, I just added my google shared stuff link to my shared link - and now it includes all three feeds.

Amazon Unbox

I'm typically not a huge music buyer. I think part of that is that I really can't stand the time it takes to go find a song, go to the store, buy a CD, rip it, put it onto some music software, sync to a device.

Ugh.

So I'm still mostly listening to stuff that I had from 10 years ago - I purchase maybe 1 CD per year.

I liked the idea of iTunes - but couldn't really get behind it because I used multiple device - my computer runs Linux, my phone has MP3s on it, my Car has a CompactFlash card slot (which I love), and I now have an iPod Touch. But only the iPod can play M4Ps.

Well, I just tried Amazon MP3 Downloads for the first time today - because it lets me download 256kbps MP3s - for $0.89 each (or less if I get the entire album). I used their downloader to get two new albums - really really simple. I one-click shopped to download two albums, and poof! There they were in iTunes.

Plugged in my iPod and they were sync'ed - and they live as MP3s on my drive - so I can copy them to anything I want.

This is totally the way that music should be. I'll be going to Amazon for all of my music from now on.
This is both a "easy to use" and a "meets my needs" thing as well as a thing based on principal. A lot of the new music that I get I find from Pandora - and I want to send a message to the labels that making their music available without DRM is the right way to go!

Posting Media

Up until recently, I had been posting any new pictures I had at flickr, and then just expecting people to get them. That was a great idea, except it only worked for images. I've been branching out to video a little lately - I have a nice little camera that can take videos as well as pictures - so I've been using that and I'm trying to publish some of them on google video. Unfortunately that meant that people had to go look in two different places.

So in the spirit of stealing ideas from the Russell's, I finally figured out why John has been posting his pictures to flickr and also putting them up on a separate blog. Now I know.

Anyway, you can find our media over at Mike Meg and Connor's Media.

Sharing News Articles

I've been watching the set of posts and articles that Paul has been putting up an RSS feed as shared for a while now.

I really like the fact that he did this, and I asked him how he managed to get stuff that came as part of RSS feeds as well as stuff he just found online and shared the articles. He was nice enough to tell me.

So I now have a page and RSS feed of articles that I think are interesting.

Since he hasn't gotten around to writing it up, I figured I would. Its a really cool combination of using del.icio.us and google reader, both of which are really smart applications that don't think of themselves as data syncs - in other words, they let you expose data that comes into them.

Google reader allows you to mark any article that you read through RSS as "shared". It then creates an RSS feed for those articles that is published to anyone who's interested. Google reader also lets you tag feeds, and for any particular tag, you can create a public feed for that tag as well.

del.ico.us likewise allows you to create bookmarks with tags. For any tag in del.ico.us you can get an RSS feed (starting to see a trend yet?).

So what Paul told me to do is to create a new tag in google reader called "share", then import both my del.ico.us "share" tag feed, as well as my google reader shared items feed into that single tag. Then publish the "share" tag as a public feed.

What you get is the ability to share any article from google reader, or any page that you may see on the net you can share too.

So

2007 Flower Show

Every year we go to the MassHort annual Flower Show. Its a great chance to get out of the winter doldrums, and really enjoy a preview of spring.


Every year, I bring a camera, and was really looking forward to playing with my new Sony A100. I figured that I should be able to do some new cool things that I never have done in the past with it, since its a full DSLR.


As we were starting to head out, I had the crazy idea that I should give Connor my compact camera to bring with him and take pictures if he wanted. I figured that he'd have fun taking pictures, and maybe even get one or two that came out pretty well.

What surprised me is how many good pictures he got. I don't think I'm just saying that cause I'm his dad either :)

Anyway, if you want to take a closer look, check out his Flickr PhotoSet, or if you want to see boring pictures from me, you can check out my Flower Show Pictures.

Outsourcing...

I'm moving my blog here to blogger, because I'm slowly outsourcing our house's entire IT hosting operation.

At one point we ran our own DNS server, DHCP server, mail server, our own web server, our own photo gallery, etc. When I was right out of college and didn't have anything else to do it was fun, and I kinda enjoyed it. And it really made me learn the then newish technology linux.

As I started to get a bit older, and realize that there is life outside a computer, I got sick of having to upgrade, patch, tweak, and fix problems. This blog is one of the last things to leave. Here's a list of where things have gone, and the order they left:

• DNS Server - www.worldwidedns.net - dns hosting for not too much money
• DHCP Server - Linksys (WRT54G - not really outsourced, but I don't have to deal with it)
• Photo Gallery - flickr.com - great app - allows me to backup all our photos for like $20 per year, almost unlimited uploads, and a cool community where I can see other people's pictures
  
• Mail Server, Web Portal - Google Apps for My Domain - this was awesome. I could move everything over, and point my old domains to this one. I didn't have to worry about any more stuff.
• Blog - here!

There's still a few things that I take care of at home, and I'm looking for good solutions to move them to easier platforms, but I suspect that I will always run a server in the house for particular things:

• Hosted web applications - when I used to run a D&D campaign, we used GEAS to keep track of the campaign. A few other people have picked it up and have their campaign there. I'd have to figure out how to move it to a hosted wiki somewhere.
• File and Print Services - I like having the ability to ssh into my fileserver from both inside and outside the firewall - I'm tempted to get something like a Bufalo TeraStation, but it seems pretty expensive for less that what I can already do.

But we've moved a bunch of stuff already, and the blog is the most recent thing to go.