I’ve been thinking spring in lots of different ways this week, in particular by doing a big spring cleaning of old photos. I’m happy to report that I now have back up copies of every picture taken of my children since birth. I came across the lovely picture of Teddy from the of May in 2006 (my pre-blogging days) that put me in a very cheerful mood so I thought I would share.

It’s funny though, although this picture of is tranquil and lovely it comes from a trip that was anything but. There were three generations of us in a large and gorgeous beach house in Lewes, Delaware. We were there for a week, and at each point during our stay someone from each generation was really sick. We actually ended up taking Tommy to the emergency room because we were worried that he had appendicitis.

But in spite of that, I still have fond memories of all of us being together, relaxing on the porch, playing on the sand, and enjoying the lily pond in the enclosed yard behind the house as Teddy is doing above.

Do you have fun weekend plans? I’ve got a very kid-friendly outing set for Saturday that I’m excited about – it involves a local museum we haven’t yet seen and a geocaching activity. I’ll be sure to share next week along with some great posts about our trip to England (yes, I’m still writing about that…)

(I do realize, by the way, that this is just a gratuitous cute-kid photo. I hope you’ll indulge me.)

Note: I originally published this post last year, but share it with you again today in honor of my mother.

Much of the advice I offer about traveling is actually the opposite of what my mother would have done. When planning for a trip, a good rule of thumb is to consider what her approach would have been and then to do the exact opposite.

I write this with all due gratitude, for she certainly was the first person to expose me to travel. Reeling after she and my father separated when I was eight, she took me and my sister from suburban Connecticut to Italy for nine months. It was my first trip on an airplane, to say nothing of my first experience with a foreign culture. But I’ve written elsewhere about the lack of travel-planning prowess this trip demonstrated. Suffice it to say that I learned much about how not to travel in the three-day odyssey from New York to Florence via Reykjavik, Luxembourg, and Basel, all of it without more to eat than bread, chocolate, and Coke.

For many years after her death, I saw my mother as less of a traveler than a fleer. She was a restless soul who never found comfort or happiness but who never stopped trying, running from place to place as if she was being chased.

Three months before she died, I watched her roll in a wheelchair onto a jetway at the Philadelphia Airport. She was in terrible pain and was wearing a wig to cover her decimated hair, but she had a chance to meet friends in Los Angeles and she wasn’t going to give up an opportunity for a final vacation. The passage of time has helped me to realize that she wasn’t always running. Just as I do, she loved travel for all its joy and possibility, for the opportunity to see things from a different perspective, to step outside the boundaries of workaday life, if only for a little while.

As I look back, I realize that my mother taught me to notice and delight in the little things about a place. Things like fresh strawberry tarts from a bakery on the Rue du Moulin Vert, which she ate greedily sitting on my narrow dorm-room bed. Or the feeling of cold sand on our feet on a Nantucket beach in October where we walked for hours as if hypnotized. There were bags of blueberries and beach glass that we brought back from Maine and apple blossoms that she snipped from a tree with her Swiss Army knife and forced into full glory at our Dutch friends’ house. She delighted in the absurd, and I can still hear the laugh she let out when we happened on the funny grave in the Montparnasse Cemetery where M. Pigeon lies forever in bed next to his (undoubtedly long-suffering) wife. This acute and charming ability to notice small but essential details is obvious in the drawings I share here, which come from a sketchbook she kept while visiting me in Paris and Amsterdam during my junior year abroad.

What I really can’t believe is that she never had the chance to travel with my boys, to see Tommy running across the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence, just as my sister and I once did, or the way that Teddy fell head over heels in love with the Eiffel Tower. She deserves a lot of credit for the way that they respond to the world. It is because of her that when we travel we seek out and eat the best ice cream in our given locale every day that we are there. It is because of her that we made a pilgrimage to Monet’s garden at Giverny (a place she herself never saw in person) and that I made sure Tommy had his sketch book and pencils. It is because of her that I know the importance of making the effort, of trying something new, even when I feel at my most low. It is because of her that I seek constantly to share that which is beautiful with my children, whether it be sunlight coming through a stained glass window or shining on pine trees at the top of a mountain.

It is because of her that I know that a restless heart doesn’t need to be an unobservant or unloving one. What more could one ask to be taught about traveling with one’s children?

In memory of Jeanne Estelle Paradis, 12/20/1942 – 4/29/1999

So I wasn’t the one to take this picture. In fact, I wasn’t even present when it was taken. On Wednesday of this week, my father and stepmother (affectionately known to my children as Poppy and Néné) took Tommy for a big blowout day in Philadelphia as a belated birthday gift. They took my little history buff on a tour of Independence Hall, showed him the Liberty Bell, and spent hours with him in the new National Constitution Center, which is apparently absolutely worth the time (and had lots that was of interest for a kid as young as Tommy, who is seven). I gave Tommy an old camera of mine and he returned with a slew of pictures that he took, some of which I feature below.

The statue of Ben is in a room where there are life-sized representations of all of the members of the Constitutional Congress, painstakingly created so their faces not only resemble portraits of the participants, but their height and girth are accurate as well. Tommy was careful to take pictures of  both Gunning Bedford and George Read, signers of the constitution from his home state of Delaware. Later in the day, he also got to vote for his favorite president of all time (Franklin Roosevelt) and to share his thoughts about what it means to be free (“I get to do what I want.”)

The best part of the day for him? Seeing the room in Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed. Oh, and getting to eat a hamburger and Cocoa Krispies for lunch and a licorice lollipop as both a pre- and post-dinner snack. For that meal, he also enjoyed a full regular sushi and a California roll followed by some wonderful ice cream confection involving hot fudge and strawberries, all topped with a lit candle. What are grandparents for? My only regret is that I don’t have a picture of the three of them enjoying their day together. A picture of their food will have to suffice.

For Photo Friday at Delicious Baby – hope you’ll visit and tour the other pictures as well.

I’m pleased to announced that the winner of the Wanderlust and Lipstick:  Traveling With Kids giveaway is Bridget Smith. Bridget blogs over at Family Adventure Guidebooks and will surely find the book handy as she wanders near and far with her three kids. Congratulations Bridget!

Many thanks are due to Michelle (aka Wandermom) and Beth at Wanderlust and Lipstick for donating the book, which I hope everyone who didn’t win will promptly go out and buy it (it’s available here and at Amazon).

In other news, I know I’ve been writing a lot lately about my mother, but this week I also have a guest post at the Ciao Bambino blog about traveling to India with my dad and stepmother. I’m very grateful to Amie at Ciao Bambino,  for encouraging me, for offering to publish my work, and for suggesting that I write on this topic. If you haven’t checked out the Ciao Bambino site, you should. For one thing it’s beautifully designed, with lots of great pictures. And they offer tons of reviews of places to stay all over the world, all of them family-approved, with clear age ratings like “toddler fun” or “cool for teens.” Look next month for a guest post here by Amie.

And finally, I’d like to direct your attention to a post on Meagan Francis’ blog about what her mother taught her about travel. Meagan is a great writer; I only recently discovered her blog but I’ve been enjoying it enormously. She also has my undying admiration for her determination to explore the Midwest with her five children in tow. I’m flattered and pleased that Meagan read my post on this same topic and was inspired to write her own.

Happy reading everyone!

Jamie runs a terrific outfit called TravelSavvyMom that I recommend to you all for its excellent writing, wit, and good humor about all things related to family travel (to say nothing of some great lodging reviews). Quoted also in the article is WanderMom who blogs about family travel over at Wanderlust and Lipstick, another favorite of mine.

In all seriousness, there is something really magical about seeing your children travel with their extended family. I know that previous generations took this kind of interaction for granted, but since we have no family closer than two hours from our house, our vacation time with grandparents and great grandparents is something we all treasure. The photo above is from a week-long trip to the Delaware shore with my parents and grandparents where there was delirium and high temperatures and much ibuprofen but also magical days at the beach, wonderful communal meals, and of course relaxing on the front porch.

I posted early in December that for the first time since I started this blog, my family was going to go four or five weeks without any travel by any member. I talked in what I hope were poetic terms about the journey of Advent and how I planned to take pleasure in the quiet of home to reflect on where I’d been this year and where I was headed in the next.

Well this ain’t a travel blog for nothing. Last week Matt’s sister Becky called to say that she, her husband Tim, and her son Mitch would not be able to come out to Delaware for Christmas as planned. And so we decided that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without them and that we would just have to go to Wisconsin. We’re flying out on the 26^th.

Of course part of why I wrote about the joys of staying home for Christmas was to offset the abounding horror stories about traveling at this time of year. It’s also easy to find tons of tips about how to avoid (or at least mitigate) holiday travel disasters. I’m not much of one for offering practical advice in the face of acts of God, but I really think there are four important things to bear in mind:

1. Breathe often and deeply
2. Assume the worst ______ (fill in the blank: weather, traffic, lines at security, health of your children)
3. Hope for the best
4. Remember what is truly most essential

This last item can be defined differently for all of us of course. To define it for myself, I turn as I often do to what I learned from a year of traveling with a one-year-old. That year we spent Christmas in Wisconsin. It came at a very difficult point in our trip when we had been on the road for six months without spending more than 8 weeks in one place. Matt and I were both exhausted and uncertain about what was coming next and although we had generally found the whole adventure to be a worthwhile undertaking, we were also wondering if we had the heart and stomach for six more months away from home:

The prairie night was cold, a deep and penetrating cold, like being trapped in an icicle set next to a fan inside an enormous freezer. Matt’s father Dave, his mother Joyce, Tommy, Matt, and I stood in the parking lot of Rotary Gardens in Janesveille, admiring the entrance to their Christmas light display: A red and green steam engine with wheels of circling white lights.

I started to cry as the round and friendly denizens of Janesville helloed each other. I cried because such moments are rare and precious things and without our willingness to travel, I would have missed it altogether. I cried because part of me didn’t want to be there. And I cried because everyone seemed so at home, even me.

It is possible that our trip to Wisconsin will have no delays, no bad weather, and no lines. But in the event that our journey is more problematic, I plan to remember exactly what is gained by traveling at the holidays.