the only way for to manage as a dad has been to take his wife and two daughters with him. With this blog, Matt shares some of the insights he’s gleaned along the way, as well as tips, tricks, reviews and other fun stories.

Building Brand Loyalty at an Early Age

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Daughter/Daddy slippers at the Four Seasons, Silicon Valley.

Daughter/Daddy slippers at the Four Seasons, Silicon Valley.

My older daughter always will remember her first visit to a Four Seasons Resort. It’s not because we spotted Bruce Willis in the elevator. It’s not because she got a personal tour of the spring collection at Badgely Mischka. It’s not even because a thoughtful housekeeper had written her name in stickers on the door to the glass shower.

It’s because she got a stuffed giraffe upon check-in. And she got to select it from a red wagon full of stuffed animals—a wagon full of gifts specifically to make younger guests feel like princes and princesses when they arrive.

For many of us grown-ups, this kind of thing is nothing more than a nice touch, a cute amenity about which we might tell our friends over Manhattans at the next neighborhood barbecue.

But for our little ones, it’s HUGE. Because it’s something they don’t experience at other resorts.

L and R got another taste of the Four Seasons treatment this weekend; on assignment for the company’s “Have Family Will Travel” blog, I dragged my family to the Four Seasons Hotel Silicon Valley at East Palo Alto. We spent the weekend there, reacquainting ourselves with Palo Alto (Powerwoman got her Ph.D. from Stanford) and bumming around the hotel.

In between, our experience was an all-star showing of kid-friendly tricks and treats—bonus treatment that the hotel extends to all of its younger guests (not just the kids of visiting journalists on assignment for the parent company).

Some of the family-oriented amenities the girls liked best:

  • A personalized welcome. When we got up to our room after check-in, housekeepers had written my daughters’ names in sponge letters on the side of the bathtub. Later in the stay, the same housekeepers set out two pairs of kid-sized slippers with sponges representing the girls’ first initials (see photo).
  • A special kid-oriented room-service menu with items such as fresh fruit, house-made rigatoni with butter (or marinara), and pancakes.
  • A DVD movie library with an extensive kid-friendly selection. For our movie time on Saturday, L selected “Tangled” and Rango” (yes, it was a chameleon kind of day). About five minutes after we started the movie (ultimately, she chose “Rango”), room service brought up complimentary buttered popcorn.
  • A cache of floaty noodles and kickboards at the pool.

(Of course perhaps my girls’ favorite “amenity” at the resort was the giant fountain in front of the property, which now is home to at least 75 of our pennies.)

The bottom line: On-site, kid-friendly touches go a long way with the next generation of luxury travelers. When we pulled into the driveway tonight, my Big Girl told her mother: “I’m happy to be home, but I miss the Four Seasons.” I’m not sure I could have said it better myself.

Take That, Magic Eyes

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Thank you, 3M.

Thank you, 3M.

Parents who travel with young children know all too well that a constant dose of new places requires creative and innovative approaches to helping sons and daughters get past irrational—and totally normal—kid fears.

Some kids might need help with overcoming the notion of eating vegetables. Others might require moral support to wrap their heads around sleeping with a blanket they don’t know.

In our family, the issue is automatically flushing toilets; my older daughter is terrified of them.

If you’ve followed my work over the years, you know I first wrote about this issue almost exactly one year ago. Since then, L’s issues with the “Magic Eyes” that control auto-flushing toilets have gotten worse. She equates them to torture (literally). She’ll hold in a pee for hours if she knows a bathroom has a toilet with a Magic Eye. And if she sees one, the damn thing becomes the subject of conversation for the next four hours.

(For the record, those automatic flushers really *are* annoying; especially when they decide you’ve finished your business and you haven’t.)

After a month in Hawaii last year, Powerwoman and I thought we devised a workaround to this phobia: We started taking cloth napkins with us everywhere to “blindfold” any Magic Eyes we encountered.

Mercifully, a friend recently suggested a more portable alternative: Post-it notes.

So far, in the name of “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” this new strategy appears to be working; this week, on two separate occasions at two different restaurants out and about, L was eager to apply Post-its and do her thang. As we get closer to our four-month stint in London (we leave Aug. 20), we’ll give her more experiences with Post-its with a goal to crack her of this phobia completely.

Do we think this new approach is a long-term fix? Not by a long shot (sorry, 3M). But at this point, after years of battling the Magic Eyes, we’ll take any minor victories we can get.

What sort of irrational fears do your kids exhibit while traveling?

Packing Tips for Air Travel with Little Ones

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Playing with Play-Doh balls on a recent flight.

Playing with Play-Doh balls on a recent flight.

Packing for travel is sort of like kissing—you always can improve. This statement rings especially true for family travelers; as our kids get older (and as we add more kids), the challenges of squeezing all of their stuff into a manageable number of bags and boxes require increasing doses of innovation and skill.

Fittingly, a reader recently emailed with a multi-part question about packing, and I thought it best to address her query here. The question:

“The hubs and I will be traveling with the 15 month old and the new baby soon. I wondered if you had packing advice – do you and your wife wear backpacks or bring traditional carry-ons, do you use one of those wheelers for your car seats, do you usually do a suitcase for the kids or just squeeze everything in one?”

Backpacks vs. carry-ons
On the subject of backpacks vs. carry-ons, the answer is yes—that is, both of us bring both, on almost every trip.

One of us takes a backpack filled with practical stuff—toys for the plane, two sets of back-up clothes (in case of accidents), a first-aid kit, and a Ziploc bag with child-strength Motrin, child-strength Benadryl and a thermometer (in case the kids get sick). The other takes a backpack that we’ve turned into a diaper bag; we’ve found this essential is easier to carry when you can just wear it on your back.

Powerwoman and I also each take one carry-on; usually we each pick a daughter for whom to pack. This keeps their clothes separate (and makes it easier to unpack).

Three other items we make sure to pack in one of the suitcases: A nightlight, a bag of outlet covers, and a camping kitchen so we can wash the kids’ cups daily (for more on the contents of that kitchen, click here).

Wheeleers
On the subject of “wheelers,” the answer is N/A.

We’re not big fans of car seats on the plane (largely because our kids aren’t big fans of sitting in them), so whenever we bring them with us, we check them (it’s free!). Before our kids were old enough to sit on their own, we took them as lap-children. We started purchasing each girl her own seat around the 20-month mark.

Still, I know dozens of parents who use “wheelers” and love them. It really depends on personal preference—and whether you want to spend a flight crammed next to a convertible car seat.

(As an aside, we do own a set of wheelers—the GoGo Kitz Travelmate, to be exact—but it has sat in the same spot of our garage since L was three months old. In fact, if you’re reading this post and you want the wheelers, let me know; if you pay the postage, they’re yours.)

Kid suitcases
Finally, on the subject of kid suitcases, the answer here is “sort of.”

Yes, we do bring one kid-sized (and kid-themed) suitcase for each girl. No, we do not pack it as we pack normal grown-up suitcases. Instead, we usually let the girls “pack” their bags with stuff they know they’re going to want to bring along—for L on a recent trip it was three or four different stuffed cats; for R, it was a bunch of fake flowers.

I recognize this strategy is completely and utterly impractical. I also can tell you it is the part of the packing ordeal our girls anticipate most. The way we see it, this is a small price to pay to fuel some excitement for a day of traveling.

Also, on a more practical level, it’s good for them to experience what it’s like to pull a suitcase through a crowded airport.

What packing tips would you share with other moms and dads?

The Best Goodie Bags Ever

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The a-mazing goodie bags for Baby V.

The a-mazing goodie bags for Baby V.

When family travel is all you know, you can’t help but share that passion with others. Case in point: A writer buddy, Meg Nesterov, who put together quite possibly the coolest goodie bags ever for her daughter’s second birthday party this coming weekend.

The bags, which will be doled out to a handful of kids and even more adults, comprise inflatable Pan Am planes (found on Amazon.com), airplane stickers, airplane coloring books, airplane candle holders, and a kid-sized pilot hats. (Thankfully, the bags will be nothing ike the ones mentioned here.)

As if that lineup isn’t kick-ass enough, Meg told me that instead of a cake, she’ll serve cookie and ice cream sandwiches cut out with transport-themed cookie cutters.

She added: “I’m hoping to find some pilot wings or might try to make my own!”

Meg, her husband and their daughter (we’ll call her V) certainly have become pros at the whole family travel thing.

The family’s trip back from Sicily last month was flight No. 52 (!!) for the little one. The family lived in Istanbul for a while (actually, Baby V was born there). According to Meg, her frequent flier also loves to point at planes in the sky—even when she’s on solid ground.

This, of course, prompted my friend to contemplate what she would have done differently if her daughter had more kid friends.

“If she were older and had more friends to join the party, I might have gone with an airplane pinata and boarding-pass invites,” Meg joked via email earlier this week. Then, of course, she started thinking about next year: “Maybe I’ll start collecting (unused) air sickness bags for future goody bags.”

However Meg plans to incorporate the family travel theme into future parties, color me inspired; we’ll be celebrating R’s second birthday in London this fall, and I might just have to borrow some of these ideas.

What are some of the wacky-but-creative ways a love for family travel has infiltrated your life?

A Little Help from Some Friends

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Three of the four musketeers, in a common pose.

Three of the four musketeers, in a common pose.

As much as I despise the word, “staycation,” we’re big fans of family travel to destinations within a 1- or 2-hour drive of our home.

Partly this is because we live in Sonoma County, California, IMHO one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It’s also because Powerwoman and I believe strongly that you don’t have to go far to experience the wonder of something new.

We put this philosophy into practice over the holiday weekend, when good friends from Central California—a family of four with two daughters, ages 5 and 3—came to visit. They arrived Wednesday night. And from that point until late Saturday, we had a Peter Pan-like panoply of adventures without ever leaving the county.

The activities themselves were fun—especially on Friday, when the eight of us took a private tour of Safari West, a private animal park with giraffes, zebras and hundreds of other animals, just down the freeway in Santa Rosa.

But what was even better was watching the girls play and laugh and bond by just being girls.

They shared cookies at a French bakery. They waved flags at a Fourth of July parade. They splished and splashed in an inflatable kiddie pool. They danced to a ragtag folk band at a local farmers’ market.

Sure, my kids had done most of this stuff before. But they’d never done the stuff with friends, and that factor enhanced each experience acutely.

This reality has been true for me, as well.

My fondest memories of that trip in high school to Acadia National Park revolve around hiking solo with a buddy who tagged along for the adventure. And as a younger child, the best parts of summer trips to Cape Cod were the lazy days with a childhood pal (and her brood).

Last night, a few hours after we parted ways, my Big Girl looked at me with sullen eyes and stated, “Doing stuff was more fun with [my buddy’s daughters] around.” In that moment, I was reminded of something we all should remember: Traveling with family can be transcendent, but traveling with family and family friends can be even better.

Wandering Pod Surfaces on Another Major Site

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A peek at the Smart Family Travel site.

A peek at the Smart Family Travel site.

Another month, another new content partnership for Wandering Pod.

This time, the partnership is with Smart Family Travel, a new family travel site published in conjunction with Scholastic’s Parent & Child magazine. The site debuted in June but didn’t really go live until this past week.

My inaugural piece serves up five stress-free tips for traveling with a toddler. To report the story, I pulled insights from this blog, my now-stagnant “Are We There Yet??” blog from Parenting magazine, and (of course) our own experiences on recent long-haul trips to Hawaii and other locales.

I’m excited to be working with other contributors to the site, many of whom are bloggers I’ve admired for years (especially Rainer Jenss and Mara Gorman).

I’m also delighted to have the opportunity to write more original content for the site on a recurring basis over the next few months. You can stay tuned for updates or follow @WanderingPod on Twitter for all of the latest news.

Why Stop at Breast Pumps?

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The new set-up at Hard Rock Chicago.

The new set-up at Hard Rock Chicago.

It’s about time.

That’s pretty much exactly what I thought earlier this week when I read about a new program at the Hard Rock Chicago through which nursing moms can request (for a tax-deductible fee) hospital-grade Medela breast pumps to use during their stays.

A breast pump! From the hotel! To save moms the hassle of bringing theirs from home! In a word, it’s GENIUS.

I know my wife would have loved this kind of amenity during our first few trips with (and the first few trips without) L and R. I’m sure thousands of other traveling mommas feel the same way.

Still, I’ve got to ask: Why stop at breast pumps?

If hotels as big and popular as the Hard Rock see some value in a family oriented amenity like this one, why aren’t more brands following suit? In a world where families comprise a growing part of the traveling public, this kind of program should be vying with offerings from other hotels through which family guests can reserve everything from jogging strollers and car seats to bottle warmers and baby food processors, all for similarly nominal fees.

Heck, at the very least, more properties should add formula sleeves (like these) to minibar menus.

(It’s not like it’s that much of a stretch; most minibars sell condoms as part of “Intimacy Kits” these days anyway.)

Please don’t misconstrue my plea; I’m not writing this as a dad pining for equal treatment. Instead, I’m responding to the situation as a parent—an equal part of a traveling unit.

At the end of the day, the easier hotels make it for all of us family folk to travel, the more we’ll want to take the kids and hit the road.

Let’s hope other brands learn from the Hard Rock and copy the approach. Sure, these types of amenities help the big hotel chains build loyalty. But in the end, we families benefit most of all.

What family friendly amenity would you like to see hotel chains adopt in widespread fashion?

Lessons in Family Travel Preparedness

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Our recent family road trip along the western side of Oahu certainly was filled with surprises.

Some of them were pleasant—on the way from Disney’s Aulani Resort & Spa to Ka’ena Point State Park, we spotted a pod of dolphins frolicking in the surf and pulled over to watch them for a while.

Others , however, were not. Like the archaeological site that was closed due to vandalism. (Remember, Powerwoman is an archaeologist; ruins are regular stops on our vacations.)

And the flat tire that we picked up outside of Waianae.

Spotting dolphins, before the flat.

Spotting dolphins, before the flat.

I’ll spare you the details of how we got the flat (to be frank, none of us really knows). The important stuff: The rear driver’s side tire on our rented Chevrolet Equinox croaked, we called AAA, and the four of us spent three hours at a roadside McDonald’s waiting for a tow truck to come and pop on the spare.

(At this point, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t just fix the flat myself. Let’s just say that I’ve learned the hard way that rental car companies don’t trust you to fix stuff that goes wrong with their cars, and if they find out that you did anything outside of you contract to the vehicle—anything at all—they will charge you. Exhorbitantly.)

(Oh, also, the rental car company could have come to fix the tire. But they estimated a six-hour wait.)

Ultimately, the encounter was nothing but a hiccup in an otherwise fun and fruitful trip. Still, the experience offered lessons in preparedness for family vacation road trips. Here’s a sampling:

  • If you’re planning on doing any major driving with the kids while you’re away, be sure to sign up for AAA Plus or Premier Service (or an equivalent) before you go. No, the three-hour wait time wasn’t ideal, but they did come and fix the flat for free. Had the damage been worse, they would have towed us back to Honolulu for free as well. When traveling with the kiddos (or solo, for that matter), It’s nice to know that you won’t get stranded.
  • Since space isn’t an issue, take the time to pack extra arts and crafts for the kids, just in case. If your children like sports, toss a ball in the vehicle as well. If you find yourself with a few extra hours to kill, these sorts of additional diversions certainly can’t hurt.
  • Triple up on healthy snacks so you’ve got enough to go around in case you end up staying out longer than expected. (We could have ordered just about anything from the McDonald’s at which we were stranded, but, quite frankly, Powerwoman and I don’t like our girls to eat that crap. We gave them blueberries and grain crackers instead.)

Also, if things go wrong, remember to keep your cool in front of the kids. Especially if they’re little (read: under five), the only reason they’ll get stressed by the situation is if they think you’re stressed. This means no panicking. It also means no snipping at your partner, and no yelling at deceitful customer service representatives (unless, of course, you can do so in a private spot).

Years from now, we’ll all be joking about the flat tire on that crazy day in Waianae. Hopefully, if you ever encounter similarly bad luck on the road with the family, you’ll be able to laugh about it someday, too.

What is the most unexpectedly stressful travel situation you’ve endured with your kids?

Balancing Work and Family Travel on the Road

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Yours truly, working the cameras from HI.

Yours truly, working the cameras from HI.

As many of you know, Wandering Pod is only one of the things I do professionally; I actually earn a living writing about family travel (and business, technology, education, science, gambling, and other stuff) as a full-time freelance journalist.

This means that many of my family’s trips are work trips for moi. It also means that a big challenge on every trip for me is figuring out a delicate balance between time for work and time for family fun.

On some trips, finding that balance is easy—if we’re doing an overnight on which I’ve got only one assignment to report—I can scribble notes here and there but otherwise can relax. On other trips—those during which I’m juggling multiple assignments for various clients in different industries—equalizing the work/life equation is a constant struggle.

No matter how crazy a trip gets, I do have a few rules.

First, I always try to involve the girls in reporting. When we’re out and about, I explain to them what I’m writing about, and ask them to give me feedback on what they experience. I do this because I think it helps foster a sense of curiosity. I also want them to understand the effort that goes into creating original work (in case they ever weigh the potential benefits of cutting corners).

Second, even if I’m working my tail off, I try to log my screen time away from the girls. At night. In the early morning. In an independent coffee shop around the corner from the hotel. My thinking here is simple: They see plenty of me standing here in front of the computer at home, and I don’t want their lasting memories of me on the road to be me in front of my netbook or Galaxy tablet.

Finally, I make it a priority never to stress about work on the road. For my kids (and, really, the four of us as a unit), travel is an adventure; I don’t ever want it to feel like a chore.

I rarely am shy about sharing these rules with others; during lectures and other speaking engagements, these form the bulk of my presentations. In recent weeks, however, a few friends have asked me to supplement these strategies with everyday “secrets” to successfully managing work and family travel. Here, then, in no particular order, are my top five tips for juggling a little better.

  1. Spread out. One way to keep work and family interactions separate when traveling is to keep them physically separate. For me, this means spending extra money for additional space. Sometimes I’ll book a suite with a separate room in which to work. Other times I’ll opt for accommodations with a large balcony. When options are limited, I’ll go for a standard room and improvise in other ways. I’ve been known to turn the bathroom into an office for the night. (As an aside, from a tax POV, if you’re spending more on a room for space to work, you can deduct more of your hotel expense.)
  2. Communicate with your partner. Especially when you’re traveling with the whole family, it’s important to give your partner an honest AND REAL-TIME sense of what your daily workload is going to be. In our family, this means a daily debriefing on a) what assignments I need to tackle b) how much time each will require and c) when it would be most convenient for everyone for me to work. These chats help keep Powerwoman and I working as a team. They also enable her to figure out how and when she can plan solo time at the gym or spa.
  3. Focus. With distractions such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, we modern humans have plenty of outlets to procrastinate and waste time online. When you’re trying to balance work and family travel, however, you can’t afford to be so profligate. To minimize distractions when we travel, I force myself to spotlight one task at a time, avoiding diversions such as email or social networking until I’ve met my deadline for the day. If I’m having particular trouble concentrating in the room, I’ll change the scenery, spending a few hours in the hotel lobby or the business center.
  4. Flex your schedule. Just because you’re grappling with work on a family trip doesn’t mean you’ve got to do so during normal business hours. My solution: I write at night, after Powerwoman and the girls have gone to bed. This works for two reasons: a) It helps me keep writing time and family time separate and b) Life is a lot quieter when everyone else is snoozing. Of course this strategy isn’t applicable when the “work” involves conference calls. Also, if I wasn’t a night owl, I probably wouldn’t be able to roll after midnight. Nevertheless, the point here is that schedule flexibility is your friend.
  5. Say, ‘No.’ Perhaps the best way to balance work and family travel is to minimize the balancing you have to do in the first place. This means thinking carefully about every assignment you allow to creep into your time on the road. In some cases, it also might mean rejecting certain opportunities, or requesting to push deadlines far enough away from your trip so the work won’t conflict.

Look, I don’t for a moment pretend to have all the answers. And, to be frank, after four full years of experience juggling work and family life away from home, sometimes I still really screw things up (let’s just say this month’s Hawaii trip was *not* a paradigm of balance).

At the end of the day, your top priority when engaging in family travel should be just that: family travel. For everything else, hopefully some of these insights can help.

What are your secrets to balancing work and family travel on the road?

Baby Steps with Behavior on Planes

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R, during happier times en route.

R, during happier times en route.

The meltdown came with about 75 minutes left in our flight home. Somewhere over the Pacific, thousands of miles east of Honolulu, where the flight began, R, our baby, went berserk.

We weren’t entirely sure what set her off. Perhaps it was exhaustion. Perhaps it was a slight-but-noticeable change in cabin pressure. Perhaps it was the sight of the setting sun from above the clouds, a beautiful-but-blinding spectacle that, to her 20-month-old eyes, must have been bright and shiny and cool and scary all at the same time.

Whatever triggered the freak-out, the poor girl went nuts. I mean, NUTS.

Shrieks. Tears. Kicks. Slaps. At one point, she was crying so hard we thought she might puke. At another point, she “went boneless” in the middle of the aisle like only babies can. (Some of you might call this “pancaking.” If you’re David Stern, perhaps you prefer the term, “flopping.”)

For 15 minutes, we were that family—the one with the wailing kid, the one that family travel-haters love to hate.

In the middle of the insanity, I looked up to count dirty looks. I lost track after 16.

And they were all unjustified. It’s not like we were just sitting there drinking free Mai-Tais, blatantly abrogating our responsibility as parents. I tried shushing R first, and when it became evident she didn’t want Daddy, I handed her to Powerwoman and tended to L (who was having a psychosomatic/jealousy freak-out of her own). My wife took the baby and walked to the rear of the airplane, where she bopped her in the galley until calmness returned.

Yes, my baby was a raving lunatic for 15 minutes during our flight home from Hawaii. You know why? BECAUSE SHE IS A BABY. As I’ve written previously, when you fly with children, it almost a given that, at some point during the flight, they will act like children. This is not a catastrophe. It’s biology. It’s reality.

It’s also a perfect reason to focus on the positives. Little R, the object of 15 minutes of ire, also was a little angel for 4 hours and 15 minutes of that same flight. By my math, this means she cried for 5.5 percent of the trip home.

For any parent, this kind of performance is a resounding success. And until the kiddos are old enough to know better, we’ll take all the forward progress we can get.