Maya was born 6 months ago, and I felt incredibly fortunate to be given two weeks paternity leave during her birth and shortly thereafter. The sad reality is that since those two weeks, I have only been able to spend uninterrupted time with her for a day or two at a time. I never really thought much about how important 24 hours per day for days at a time could be. As the days turned to weeks and to months after Maya was born, I started to realize that just working a full-time job meant that I was going to miss significant time in my daughter’s life. As this reality set in, I found myself asking, “how am I going to find the capacity to block off large sections of time to make certain that Maya is not just my daughter, but my best friend?” I started to think about ways that I could achieve this at home and activities and adventures that I could plan around the city. Maybe some parents can pull this off easier than I can, but at home I am always muddled down with distractions, social arrangements and obligations. We planned this trip to Switzerland to prove we could still be traveling fools with a baby in tow, but I received something much better from that experience that I wasn't exactly expecting. I also have to admit I may have had some internal reservations about traveling with a baby so far away (don't tell Meg). How much time would we spend dealing with her being cranky or missing out on things because she needed to eat, nap or poop? But after it was all said and done, what was the best part of our trip to Switzerland? The Alps? The Chocolate? The Castles? All awesome, but the best part of Switzerland was the uninterrupted 24-7 time that I was able to spend with Megan and Maya. Just our family. How did I not know that would be the reward? I’m certain that going overseas isn’t the only way to find a way to spend this amount of time with just your family, but it sure did work for me!
I am a graduate student at the experience over things academy. The best gifts at Christmas are those that promise another get together with some sort of entertainment included. Tickets to a concert or play. Passes to one of those sip and paints or craft workshops. Anything that puts something on the calendar for you and your family or friends to get together. Not only does it ensure that you will get together with that person, but it also guarantees that you will be getting together to do something fun. Relationships of all kinds benefit from having experiences that are exciting and fun. When thinking about a family dynamic this is especially important to remember. Otherwise it’s just more "who is going to take out the trash?" and "who is going to clean the bathroom?". With the frequency of mundane and tiresome tasks, it is paramount to develop your relationship with your family while you are doing new, fun and exciting things.
One day as we were leaving Lucerne and driving to Interlaken the clouds started to break up a little bit and we could really start to see some of the Swiss mountain ranges extending up into the clouds. The mountains and landscape beauty get me as excited as a kid at Christmas. So, as we were driving to Interlaken, I started to get really charged up. As I am laughing and pointing things out to Megan, I start to hear Maya laughing from the backseat in her car seat. Energy is so contagious and you’re a product of the company you keep. Just by being around this exceptional landscape that made my energy levels skyrocket, Maya started to laugh and get stoked all the same as I did. Do you know how powerful that is? She literally doesn’t know any words but is perfectly in tune with my energy. I can only assume she’s thinking, “Daddy is so stoked and that makes me so happy I am going to laugh out loud!”
After long days of touring through the Zurich, or wandering around in small mountain towns, we would come back to our Airbnb completely wiped out. Maya sleeps like a rock when we are pushing her through the city in her stroller. So, as we would walk in and drop ourselves on the couch, Maya could lend her energy to us, the same way I was able to lend her mine in the car. It
would only take a few minutes from me to go from completely wiped to smiling and laughing with Maya as she would roll around on a blanket while playing with a toy or pursing her lips together and blowing out in her first attempts of whistling, “take me out to the ballgame” (we still have some work to do on that one). This energy trade travels down both sides of the street and there is no limit to the speed traveled. Sometimes the traffic only flows down one side or the other. Sometimes the speed of travel is so fast down that one side ignites the other to get moving from a dead stop. Most of the time it only takes a spark and before you know it the whole family is riding the energy at full speed! You can only hope that you took enough pictures or wrote enough down to capture those moments.
Megan and I enjoy some of the same things but many different ones as well. We have tastes that range the spectrum and I think that our differences complement each other incredibly well. As it is impossible to list all our similarities and differences, I would classify Megan as much more refined and careful, where I am ready to climb an 8,000-meter peak and jump out of airplanes. That said, I don’t think either one of us expected the best part of our vacation to simply be the time that we spent together, getting to know our daughter and learning who we are as a new family. And we are an incredibly awesome family (no bias here)! It almost sounds too cliché to be true, and I avoid clichés like the plague! It seemed like anytime that someone was struggling or tired someone else would invariably pick them up with just a simple laugh or a smile.
While it is possible to find block of time around home, being someplace incredible will undoubtedly have a positive effect on the quality of that time. Buying a friend a ticket to a game for their favorite team will give you an enjoyable experience with that friend for the three-hour duration of the game. Not only because the game is fun to watch, but because both you and your friend are fun people and feed off the fun-factor in that sort of an arrangement. If you want to provide a setting for you and your family for 9 days at a 24 hour a day clip, just take your family to Switzerland (or if you don't have that time or money, any little road trip with some time away from home will do the trick). While the landscape is amazing, the food is delicious, and the adventures endless; The energy and the feels you will get from your family by simply vibing off one another is more valuable than any item in the world! Maya’s laugh and smile being sparked by my initial excitement and energy is one of the most precious exchanges that I have ever experienced. Stuff and things are alright, but the laughs and love our family shared in Switzerland is one of my life’s greatest achievements. It’s something that I will spend the rest of my life trying to repeat as often as possible. Thank goodness we only plan to do more of this with OUR tiny TRAVELER!
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Cheers!
Daddy Mikey
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