B.E. (Before E), John and I took advantage of those super last minute airfares to places like London, Paris and Prague somewhat regularly -- like maybe twice a year. It was easy to pack a bag for a long weekend, leave at 7 p.m. on a Thursday or Friday, and arrive at our destination early in the morning. We didn't have an eating and sleeping schedule that needed to be worked around, or anything other than ourselves to deal with.
Since E was born, we've really limited how much we travel, particularly by airplane. We've only been to Houston to visit my family once, when E was 9 months old and he was great on the flight. But that's our only time on a plane with E. We did a crazy thing and drove 14 hours over two days to Indiana to visit John's mom, and that trip ended up going amazingly well. The trip by plane takes about 14 hours, too, so I preferred breaking it up into two days and having control over the situation by being in the car.
The reason for my hesitation to fly is stupid. It all boils down to my fear that E will freak out and the people around us will hate us. This stems from my pre-baby days when I really didn't like kids very much (confession: it still takes a lot for me to like a kid who isn't mine, but I'm definitely more tolerant of kids in general). Now, I'd like to tell my old self to just chill the hell out. I don't expect everyone to want to have kids or to like kids, nor to like my kid. That's fine. But kids are a fact of life, and kids have to travel sometimes. They just do. And sometimes it's not even that they HAVE to travel, but just that the parents WANT to travel, and that's ok too, damnit.
And lately John and I have been missing our fun, spontaneous trips. We regularly receive emails for really good fares on trips to places we would love to go, so we finally decided just to get E a passport and to just take the plunge. So this weekend we're taking a somewhat secret trip to Paris. Secret because we are not telling our families we are choosing to fly to Paris over visiting them. We'll get to them eventually...
We got a great deal on airfare, and so we've decided to splurge a bit and stay at a rather nice hotel in a great area. I'm excited and can't wait to take E to the Rodin Museum (he loves "statues") and to just walk all over. We used to just spend a lot of time sitting in cafes reading and watching, but I don't think that will work out this time, so we will be true tourists.
And E may soon be getting additional stamps on his passport because John was invited to give a talk at a conference in Germany in July, and we are thinking of going with him. But we'll first see how this weekend's two almost-7 hour flights, and the accompanying jet lag, go...
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