Recently in Toddlers Category

It was our last morning in Taipei. We were a bit sad to go and not just because we had a 8 hour 20 minute China Airlines flight ahead of us. Taipei surprised us as with its varied culture, tasty cuisine and relatively baby-friendly city. Of course, we were extremely fortunate to have Allan and Susan as our hosts who helped navigate our outings, choose the restaurants, and speak the language for us. The few times we went out by ourselves, we managed with a lot of pointing (most menus have pictures) and gesturing. I realized that cab drivers were more likely to understand the word "okay" than "yes" which came in handy and not surprisingly, Geoff started recognizing certain Chinese characters during our trip. We were certainly glad we came to Taipei, knowing that as much as we packed into our week trip, there was still much to be explored. We never had a chance to take some day trip to the north coast like Yeliu which looked mystical with its sandstone formations, and we never made it to the National Palace Museum - not too surprising since it wasn't until we moved to Paris that we finally went...

On our last full day, we decided to start early with an official children's activity for Mirabelle. We had researched places to take kids in Taipei. But when we sought information online, we found several of them to be closed - including the Children's Museum of Taipei and the Children's Museum of Transportation. Susan said one of her friends with kids recommended Baby Boss, but the minimum age was three. With Mirabelle not even quite two yet, we thought that might be a stretch. We decided on the Children's Recreation Center which was supposed to be great for younger kids and appeared to still be up and running. In fact, the Children's Recreation Center turned out to be much like an old-fashioned amusement park. It had a Ferris wheel, bumper cars, carousel, boat ride, train, and other rides, in addition to several playgrounds with swings, slides and a variety of climbing apparatuses. We lucked out since it was a warm, sunny morning during the week which meant we pretty much had a nice day at the park to ourselves along with a few other families. Unlike most American amusement parks, there were no size or age minimums. Instead, younger children...

We've made it to Taipei. Perhaps it's unwise to boast when we still have to make it back, but the plane rides weren't as bad as I thought they'd be. Of course, in our three plane rides, we got pretty lucky - in the first ,we had three bulkhead seats for the three of us (even though Mirabelle at just under two was still a lap child); in the second, we flew business class; and in the third, we actually had four seats to ourselves. I didn't think it possible to keep a toddler in an airplane seat for 12 hours straight, but somehow we pulled it off. I had read that with toddlers, it's best not to let them know that getting out of the seat was an option (like a car), but I didn't think Mirabelle would go for that. But it did work, and instead of letting her roam in the aisles, we let her jump around in her seat or on the floor for intervals. We had videos for her, but she actually didn't log as many hours watching as I would have thought. Instead, it was a little bit of everything - watching TV, napping,...

Is there really any appropriate preparation that one can do to spend 43 hours on an airplane with a toddler?  We've packed movies, games, snacks, emergency chocolate, pacifiers (scoff if you will, but the passengers of Flight C1001 will thank me), even toys wrapped as presents to be doled out every few hours.  We shall see. Perhaps we will have gone through all our resources in the first few hours leaving Mirabelle ripping down the aisles with chocolate streaming down her cheeks.  There's only one way to find out.Will it be worth it?  A week on the beach in Hawaii will definitely be a treat (see the photo of huge snow heaps currently in Boston), but I'm not quite sure what to expect with Taipei.  Will it be as vibrant as Tokyo, as polluted as Bangkok or as organized as Singapore?  Will it be at all 'kid-friendly'?  I've talked to a lot of friends with kids and many of them do little traveling and when they do, it's short trips within the U.S.  I haven't yet come across any friends who have said, "Taipei, oh yeah, we went there with the kids."  So we are either incredibly adventurous or...

"You won't be able to do that once you have a kid," people often warned me in my pre-parent state, usually in reference to moving or traveling.  My husband Geoff and I had visited a dozen countries - Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Tunisia, to name a few, in addition to the typical European holidays in France, England, Spain and Switzerland.  Not to mention, we developed a habit of picking up all our belongings and moving to a new place - sometimes for a few months, other times for a few years.  We lived in Boston, New York and Paris in a span of literally three years at one point. There's definitely the assumption that if marriage didn't get you to "settle down" then surely having children will.  Perhaps that's why when our daughter Mirabelle was two months old, we packed up all our stuff and moved to London for a summer.  In part we wanted to prove to all the naysayers that we could travel with child, but mostly we wanted to prove it to ourselves.  And perhaps that's why as our daughter Mirabelle approaches her second birthday, she will have lived in seven apartments in three cities across...