Sunday, January 16, 2011

Nora the Explorer

So my family is going to Budapest in April, and we’re super excited. We’ve been talking about this trip for almost two years now, and it looks like it’s actually happening. Since we decided on going a couple of years ago, we had left it as an open invitation for our family: whoever wants to go and is able to go is welcome. So far it will be me, Nick, my brother and sister, and aunt and uncle, Kathy and Norman. …Oh, and Nora. Yes, Nora, our baby who, upon departure, will not quite be ten months old. I’ve been asking myself one question since we bought our plane tickets two days ago: am I crazy?

In the last few days I’ve been reading all kinds of air-travel tips for traveling with babies, and I don’t know if this has done more to reassure me or stress me out to no end. So many things that I had kind of thought of before but not really, and then so many other things that had never even crossed my mind. We kind of keep saying, ‘eh… we’ll figure it out.’ Will we? I, for one, like to plan… and I’m pretty sure I’ll be planning the crap out of this trip until the minute we leave.

What would possess us to make such a decision, you may ask? Well, we thought, if we leave her here with the grandparents, it will be really hard on them and on her to be away from us for ten days. If we bring her, it will probably be pretty hard on us for ten days. We decided we’d be the responsible parents this time around and bear the burden. But really, I am doing my best to be totally optimistic and remind myself of the fact that yes, we will now need to plan more carefully, we will need to pack more stuff, we will need to work around Nora’s schedule, BUT – if I was away from her for that long I just KNOW I would be missing her and worrying about how and what she was doing the entire time. At least now she will get to be with us, we’ll get to be with her, and she’ll get a taste of international traveling at a very young age. And really… how cool will it be for Nora to have a passport with stamps from halfway across the world before her first birthday? Plus I think she’ll have the cutest passport picture ever.


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