Little Footsteps in the Big World

When I was pregnant with baby girl, we decided to cloth diaper. It was a decision my husband and I made together. People around us thought we were crazy when they heard about this. But we simply didn't want the 2,000 kilograms of diapers our child would generate to be still present on earth in 2260 in the same form as they were disposed. Long story short, we've been successfully cloth-diapering for two years (and targeting to potty-train her in the summer). At some point last year, we decided to take it to another level: we wanted to cloth-diaper while traveling. The first few trips with baby girl (including a week of Berlin when she was 2.5-month-old) were accompanied by disposable diapers. After a couple of trips, we decided that it didn't make sense. If we could cloth-diaper at home, we could cloth-diaper on the road. After many attempts, these are some tips we could share, in case you choose to travel in cloth. Self-service laundry are now available everywhere (in...

Every parent has a hard time realizing how fast their children grow up. Moms want their babies to stay little forever, and dads want their children to never leave for college. Unfortunately, they do grow up. And they do it quickly. How did this happen to me? My baby girl still sleeps in the same crib. She still eats while sitting on her high chair. I still carry her on a baby carrier. She's still in diapers! What changed? The price of her plane ticket changed. Now we need to buy her a plane ticket for in full price. Sigh. My baby girl turned two last month, in mid April. Until then, we only needed to pay 10% of the full plane ticket price that I'd pay for myself, and she can travel on my lap. Now that she's two, the aviation companies decide that she needs her own seat. I mean, to be real, she probably won't even sit by herself. But it is what it is. I honestly didn't know about this until quite recently. I thought that children pay half price at least until the...

It's one of the phrases we usually hear when we're sharing our travel plans with someone (of course, who doesn't know us that much). Other that that, there is "why not leave her (with grandma) and enjoy the trip (just with your husband)", or "poor baby, it's such a hassle, she will suffer the whole trip!" Now let me get this straight, my baby girl doesn't suffer during any kind of trips. And we actually do enjoy that she is with us, as much as she enjoys the trip itself. Do we know that she will not remember? Yes, probably she won't. Do we care? No, we really don't. It's not whether she will remember that she'd visited the Acropolis that is important to us. It's the act of traveling itself that matters. That she experiences the whole process from the earliest days possible. Because traveling, like other types of experiences, helps shaping a child's personality. Baby girl playing with a the son of a family friend we v...