Travelling with the AP Baby

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For Christmas, Ben, Lydia and I went with my family to spend the week at a Mexican resort. We’d never been to a resort and we’d never gone away for Christmas so it was a very different experience.

It was lovely. The weather was perfect the whole week. We got so much sleep and sunshine, and saw all kinds of beautiful things.

Naturally, when we came back we had a lot of people ask how it went, traveling with a baby. The short answer: it went smashingly.  I suspect that four months is the ideal age for traveling: she still doesn’t eat solids, so food a non-issue, but she’s not a completely floppy and defenseless newborn, either.

I also have a hunch that the practices of attachment parenting (AP) also helped to ease our traveling experience. I thought I’d go over some of the benefits of traveling with an AP baby — at least in our experience. I’ll just go over the four tenets of attachment parenting I’ve already discussed in previous posts.

I just want to be clear on one thing, though: of course, traveling with an AP baby is more difficult and complicated than traveling with no baby. Sure, there were tough moments, like when she pooped a mega-poop as soon as we sat down on the plane and we couldn’t get up to change her until we were up in the air and the seat belt light had gone off. She liked to have her meltdowns right in the middle of our classiest meals, too. But on the whole, it was pretty low-stress and I’m totally excited by the prospect of traveling with her again in the future.

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Being able to wear my baby was so great on vacation. Ben, Lydia and I spent Christmas morning walking along the sunny beach until we found a beautiful, turquoise freshwater spring to wade in. Sand is no hindrance when you’ve got a sling.

While we were out in Mexico we saw and climbed on two Mayan ruins, went swimming in a cenote and visited a traditional Mayan family all in one day, and never had to unfold a stroller.  I wore her into restaurants and visited the buffet while she peeked out from the sling. It was so handy to be able to pop her in and out of the sling all week long. And she got to have a 360-degree view of it all.

I must warn you, though: don’t try this if you hate attention. Everywhere we went, people were pointing, ogling, awww-ing, and even laughing. We felt like celebrities. The vendors in Playa del Carmen thought we were downright hilarious. It was like no one had ever seen anything like it.

Bedsharing

OK, I guess bedsharing didn’t make a really huge difference on the trip. All of the hotels we stayed at had a crib option, so that would have been easy enough. We declined the offer, though, and kept her with us, just like at home. Except out here we got king sized beds. What luxury! Oh, I wish we could have that at home!

Breastfeeding

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Clik here to view.Breastfeeding is so ideal for traveling. We didn’t have to pack a single thing to feed her for the whole week — no bottles, no bottled water, no mixes. I don’t think I would have done it if we’d been formula-feeding her. I can’t imagine having to wash bottles and tote all that paraphernalia with us everywhere we went.

With breastfeeding, I could feed her anytime, anywhere — on the plane, on the beach, in restaurants . . . the sling worked as an excellent cover to keep feeding discreet when I didn’t have my official nursing cover nearby. I even nursed her while walking a couple of times because she started to wail as we were heading back to our room at night. (I will even confess I did this without a cover one time because it was dark and I was desperate).

The other great thing about exclusive breastfeeding: it’s a panacea for all baby problems. Is she tired? Hungry? Grumpy? Confused? Boob. It’s always the answer. We don’t use a pacifier, so that’s another piece of plastic junk we don’t have to keep on us and keep sterilized. I’ve always got a (relatively) clean pacifier on hand (*ahem* — me), and we never have to worry about it falling onto the ground.

Elimination Communication

So this didn’t really work out on the trip. We actually had her in disposables — the eco-friendly kind, made with corn starch — for the most part.

While it was kind of nice to only have to change her diaper a handful of times a day, overall I hated the disposables. I hated how they left her bum all creased and wrinkly. Cloth never does that. I know it’s just psychological, but it just felt gross to me to keep all that urine-soaked material against her skin for hours, especially in that hot weather. So we let her go diaperless when we could — on the beach, in our room.

At home we’ve totally mastered nighttime EC, and so I took her into bed diaperless with us a couple of times. We’d brought a lightweight plastic container to act as her potty while we were out there. The first night, I caught all her pees and kept the bed perfectly dry. I was very proud of us. The next night: not so good. The time-change coupled with unusual sleeping patterns threw us off. I had her on a towel but she peed through that and onto the bed. I felt bad about that, making the nice maid change our wet bedding and pee-soaked towels. And then I made the same mistake the next night. Oops. So maybe from now on we don’t do that in other people’s beds.

So we learned a lot on our tropical vacation. Babies totally don’t have to stand in the way of international travel. I don’t know if traveling with kids will ever be as easy as it was this time, but I wouldn’t mind the chance to try! Maybe next time we’ll do something a little more challenging than staying at a resort.

Have you ever traveled with young children? What kinds of things helped to make it go smoothly?