Traveling With Children and Other Ways to Go Completely Mad

The Husband and I love, love, love to travel.  Unfortunately, we have a terrible affliction, called Severe Amnesic Parental Post-travel Syndrome (or S.A.P.P.S.), whereupon we travel with our kids, they act completely insane, we swear never to take them anywhere again until they at least mature for five more years, then we arrive home and one of us says to the other, “Hey, lets drive to Montana next month!”

I mean, my kids are actually good travelers.  They love to go places and the 6 and 4 year olds can actually pack their own suitcases. With clothing. That’s the right season.  I mean, so what if they don’t sleep at all the first two to six nights that we arrive at our destination?  And, really, they only fight about 72 percent more than they would if we were at home so it’s actually a win-win situation, no?

So last month, we went on a beach vacation and spent most of our waking moments rescuing Love Bug from dangerous stairs and other non-childproof situations as well as trying to get The Queen Bee to stop screaming at us for various injustices, such as asking her to get dressed so we could go to the pool.  And we said, “THAT’S IT!!!  WE ARE NEVER TAKING ANY OF YOU ANYWHERE EVER, EVER AGAIN!”  Exhausted and dazed, we left for home a day early and two days after that, The Husband said, “Hey, let’s go to Pittsburgh for the weekend.”

And I said, “Okay, that sounds good. Hey, do you think we could take the kids to the wonderful children’s museum there?”  I looked wistfully into the distance, wondering if several of our friends would be able to get together that weekend, perhaps meet us at our favorite local Italian restaurant.

It’s a terrible disease, S.A.P.P.S.  And sadly, there is no cure.