Traveling With A Child - Blog Posts

Story #68, which is a negative travel experience.

Here I am in my late 30s. Now scroll down my Instagram and see what I was like nine years ago - practically the same woman but with her first child (and don’t forget to wow me with “you haven’t changed a day!”) So when the baby girl turned 18 months old, our little family of three adventured off to Bulgaria - our first holiday in the status of parents.

It is not unheard of for a newly-minted mother to be cautious and plan everything ahead when a child is involved. That’s what I did. A hotel with a kid’s pool and a playground - ticked. A restaurant with a menu for picky toddlers - ticked. A suitcase filled to the brim with diapers, fruit smoothie pouches, formula, and every medicine imaginable - ticked. I was prepared for everything.

What I couldn’t have been prepared for was that three days into the holiday, Ann, my unlucky daughter, would start burning - not under the hot Bulgarian sun, but with a fever. A nasty virus, caught somewhere at the airport, and oral thrush, caught when she wined and dined herself with the beach sand are both quite innocent, but a deadly bouquet when worsened by a child violently teething. 

We made it through the holiday watching cartoons (frigging Blue Tractor), eating the suitcase of smoothie pouches, and pushing a stroller along the most deserted streets of the town. 

The hardest part was to watch her looking at the pool through the balcony bars, knowing that she couldn’t join the other kids there. The lesson learned hard - I hadn’t taken my second child on an abroad trip until all his teeth claimed their rightful places in his mouth.