Our travels and travails with a kid in tow

When a child comes into one's life, it hugely changes everything about holiday trips. Just like it hugely changes almost every possible aspect of life :)

When our little one was born, we waited for about 6 months to start our first holiday with the bundle of joy. Or rather the little mixed bag who brings along a do or die routine gift wrapped with a whole lot of sleepless nights. (I slept for a first full night two years after he was born and I still remember the euphoria I felt the next morning!) Anyways, I digress.

So that first holiday was to Bandipur Forest Reserve. And guess what we did? Spent a huge amount of time packing his food, medicines, clothes and more clothes, his little personal rocking bed(my self invented translation for what we call 'thooli' in Tamil). Not to mention being terrified all the time that we might have forgotten something. Then we chose a train to a place that is much more easily reachable by car because I could not see myself managing him in a car for 8 hours. 

And when we finally got there, even before we looked around and appreciated the cottage, we frantically searched for a suitable place to hang his personal bed and urgently rocked him to sleep. And then tiptoed around the cottage in semi darkness, trying to get a glimpse of everything in it and about it, shushing each other whenever one of us inadvertently made a slight noise or if the wood creaked under our feet. You see, our kid had this uncanny knack of waking up for the slightest of noises or even if the lighting around him changed. And need I tell anyone as to what happens when a under 1 year old does not get enough sleep?!

That holiday finally ended up as one where we did the same home routine in a different place, made a little tougher since we had to carry everything from a cooker to baby food supplies, wash his clothes and put the them in plastic bag until we could get home to dry it in the sun .
We also watched everyone else  have a real vacation while we took turns to watch him as the other went to get a whiff of what an actual holiday usually is. (The husband went for a swim and I later went to the Spa). But still, we just had to do it because we went crazy from staying home for so long with an unbelievably constant schedule.

Over the years, things eased out a little with his slowly growing up and his routines becoming more forgiving and less regimental. Also, with us maturing a little more as parents, learning the nuances of handling a child and more importantly, managing our expectations!

Fast forward over many such attempts at vacationing, we recently did what can be termed as a crowning glory to our adventures with our little kid. We did a 3 week trip to Europe with the five year old kiddo! And he totally won the 'hero of the trip' title with beautifully adjusting to crazy schedules, being more interested in what went on around him and completely getting into adventure mode. To paraphrase this whole point is one lovely moment that has become such a fond memory for me.

Having spent about two weeks hopping between cities and countries, the little one looked up to me as we were standing in a bus that ferried us away from the flight to the airport terminal at Venice and asked ' Amma, where are we? How many days are we going to stay here?' :) :)
I guess with parents like us, he finally decided to jump into the bandwagon labelled ' Adventure is out there!!!'

Here is to many more explorations with a little human who gives such an interesting perspective to the world, as we see it through his lens :)

That inextinguishable love for the written word

I have now lost count of the number of 'breaking hiatus' and comeback posts that I have written.
But that also indicates an important thing to me. That my love for writing is an inextinguishable flame within. It sometimes flickers, sometimes rages and at other times just quietly burns. It never dies.

In fact, I wouldn't say I have not been writing at all. As a much loved hobby and therapeutic exercise that it is, it comes out in everything from whats app messages that I write, communication write ups that I write for some interest groups that I am part of and sometimes just in the chats with my sister :)

The same goes for reading too. While I had plenty of time to dedicate to reading as a child, teenager and a carefree single woman, with a household to run by myself and a kid who is a handful to manage, reading time has taken a hit too. But it is yet another constant flame within.

It visits me like a long lost friend when I see a shelf full of books unexpectedly at a holiday resort and I end up choosing a bunch of them and getting them to the room to read. In our recent family holiday to a small lakeside resort near Dindugul in Tamil Nadu, a treasure chest of books was kept in the dining area. After every meal, I would bring back a couple of them :) I got to  finish a very interesting and short translated work. And RK Narayan's American diaries got me hooked. I marked it as 'to read', got back home and never thought about it until now, as I write this.

Nevertheless, I consider that inextinguishable love for reading and writing as a blessing. It is something that saves me ever so often form the trials of life and even the dreary feelings of mundane existence. It shows up magically to sprinkle pixie dust on times that are hard or just not that exciting. A good read reaches my hand and am suddenly drowned in a journey of someone, someplace far away.

I have several unwritten posts by now - ruminations, travel stories, book reviews. I probably cannot even recollect enough to be able to write about them now. But its never too late or too little.

Just like the sudden urge to write that translated into this post, I hope to be able to do my reading and writing in various forms all through my life. And in the meanwhile, may I get that discipline to come to this space and write regularly , more for myself than anything else.

So long!