If you missed my last post, it was (very originally) titled, “The 10 Best Things about Travelling with Kids”.
Pfft. Move along
suck-arse me from yesterday. It’s time to get real. Welcome to the B-side.
1. You need superhuman hearing.
New York City is
notoriously loud. There’s traffic, sirens, Subway announcements and not
infrequent confrontational outbursts (often with only one visible side to the
confrontation, if you catch my drift).
And with two kids
aged 6 and 4, Hoff and I are already at a disadvantage given that their mouths
are a good two feet below our ears.
Yet despite this
ear to mouth deficit, the two of them still insist on choosing the noisiest
moments to begin an earnest and apparently critical conversation, exploding
with indignant rage and frustration should we struggle to hear. Even if the
reason we can’t hear one of them is because it’s the other one responsible for
the relentless cacophony.
What’s that? There
a full scale emergency and fire, ambulance and police vehicles are roaring by,
sirens blaring? Sure, choose now to regale me with a list of your top fifteen
favourite Pokemon and justification for each.
Yep. Here we are.
Standing on a Subway platform with trains roaring past simultaneously on either
side, a garbled announcement banging on about goodness knows what and competing
plastic bucket drummers at either end of the platform. But sure. Choose now to
ask me who or what God is. And face away from me too when you ask. That’d be great.
2. They argue over the dumbest stuff.
If I never have
another conversation about who is going to press the lift buttons it’ll be too
soon.
Or who is going
to hold whose hand.
Or who gets to
put the key in the hotel room door.
Or who gets to
sit next to whom.
Or who gets to hold the menu despite neither of them have the literacy skills to make head nor tails of it.
I managed
diplomacy for about 2 days. Now I think I’m just going to let them fight to the
death.
3. Their inability to take a normal photo.
Despite the fact
that they both learned what a circle is at least two years ago, they still
can’t quite seem to grasp the concept of both smiling and looking at the little
black circle on the back of mummy’s phone.
I mean, it really
is the world’s least complicated multitasking request – look at the camera,
smile.
The Boy Child
likes to dab, floss and generally look over his left shoulder in any and all
photos.
The Girl Child
likes not only to dial up the cuteness by doing her best Shirley Temple
impression, but she likes to insist everyone else in the photo does it too.
Which usually results not in the a photo of all of us looking like Shirley
Temple, but in a photo of all of us arguing as to why we have no interest in
doing that.
4. Tiny little hurricanes.
Not the cocktail
– my children. (Though a cocktail might help me cope, to be fair).
These two can
transform any given space – a hotel room, a restaurant table, the back of a
hire car, a hotel lobby – into a filthy pig sty before you can even say, “so
guys what would you like to eat?”
Straw
wrappers/napkins/un-laminated menus? Ripped to a million pieces.
Hotel room
doorways? That’s where you’ll find a shoe, hairbrush and half an outfit that
was discarded the minute they walked through the door.
Airport transfer?
Of course you thought it was a good idea to play Uno and scatter the cards all
across the backseat including being wedged behind your car seats. How silly of
me to assume you’d just…leave the car in the same state that you found it.
5. Tensa barriers.
Most commonly
found in airport immigration, attraction queues and any and all stressful
security-type situations.
Something about
them makes the Boy Child think he’s a ping pong ball and he proceeds to bash them
from side to side up and down the queue.
The Girl Child is
still small enough to fit under them so she can make a quick getaway knowing
that I can’t dash after her without zig-zagging around their formation.
And both of them
can’t seem but help fiddling with the joins in them until they inevitably fly
off the bollard, flicking up and almost blinding them in the process.
I wish I would’ve thought to condition them both to think that Tensa Barriers are like electric fences from when they were still young enough to believe me. I tried this trip but they weren’t buying it.
Worse than that, now when they run up and down the queue bashing into them, they make zapping sound effects to go with it. #winning
6. Random shoe removal.
The Girl Child
takes her shoes off everywhere.
It’s like this
deranged game whereby if you dare to remain in the same place for more than
four minutes, she’s decided that this is home now and she’s making herself
comfortable.
Restaurants,
hotel lobbies, boats to the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, you name it. She’s
made herself comfortable there.
Better yet, she hasn’t quite developed the motor skills (or motivation) to always put them back them back on again, which involves one of us putting down all of the many things we have in our hands, locating one if not both of said shoes, and my least favourite part – bending over.
7. Are we there yet?
A time-honoured
travelling with kids cliché, sure, but super idiotic as well, no?
Surely if the
vehicle is still moving then, no, we are not, in fact, there yet.
I’ve taken to
just telling them that yes, we are there. Well done.
Why don’t you try
exiting this express subway carriage and see what happens?
8. Their tiny bladders.
We started the
road trip portion of our journey today. We’re driving from NYC to Niagara Falls
and back again, via Lancaster, PA, Scranton, PA, Rochester NY, Niagara Falls,
ON, Ithaca, NY, Sleepy Hollow, NY and Red Bank, NJ.
That’s a 9 day
trip, 20-odd hours of driving, 5 overnight stops and a whole lot of “why don’t
you just look out the window?” to get through.
Today we
literally got ten minutes into the first hour of our first day of driving, when
the Boy Child announced he had to pee.
Talk about road
rage.
9. License Plate Game Uselessness
Now that we’re on
the road – the game is back. Hoff and I have done this on our two US road trips
so far and never got higher than 46.
But neither of the
kids can read fast enough to help us track down all 50 states license plates.
Worse than that,
they often demand things like food and water and attention, which costs us
critical plate-scanning time.
To be fair,
though, the Boy Child did ask what pictures are on some of the plates we need.
I told him one has a rainbow, which is the license plate from Hawaii. Should
keep him busy for a while.
10. The exhaustion.
The talk. All. day. long.
And this constant need to converse leaves you feeling literally exhausted.
Well, that along with the constant need to risk assess each and every environment we encounter and the multitude of ways in which they might put themselves in harms way therein.
Which is fine, but the exhaustion does tend to stunt the creative juices somewhat.
Like when you’re trying to think of a last item in a list for a blog that you’re writing while you sit in the hotel laundry waiting for the washing and drying to finish… Makes it kind of tricky to think of anything good actually…
(‘Night.)