Traveling with a two-year-old is parenting on hard mode. You don't have your routines, your support, or the baby doll your two-year-old daughter drags around the house. | | | | | Traveling with a two-year-old is parenting on hard mode. You don't have your routines, your support, or the baby doll your two-year-old daughter drags around the house. Dining out is living on the edge. And how do you explain why we're going into another cathedral? But somewhere between the third gelato meltdown and the fifth playground, Tuscany starts to feel less like a destination and more like a place we're actually inhabiting, however briefly. We've been in Tuscany a few days now, and this has become our routine: self-catered breakfast at the agriturismo (farm-stay accommodation) - oatmeal, with the usual request of raisins and peanut butter - and then a long winding drive to whatever destination we plan to explore. Sometimes we make it back for naps, sometimes we power through the day and the frayed emotion a napless afternoon brings. I think about all those tourist towns - Orvieto and San Gimignano and even Pisa. There's real depth there, centuries of history we only skimmed because the kids couldn't sit still long enough to see it. But they led us somewhere else - residential playgrounds, quiet markets, the parts of each town off the typical tourist trail. Here's a look at everything we did, and everything we learned. | | | Our guide, Ilya, runs over and searches the dirt. "Look! Start digging!" he says. The kids all drive their hands into the soil, spreading it around with their fingers. One of them holds up what looks like a rock - Ilya wipes the dirt off and stands, gives it a whiff. A truffle.
The group passes the tiny mushroom around, each of us sniffing it. My daughter, Maggie, still not sure how to "sniff," only wiggles her nose. To my son, William, it's the worst thing he can imagine. He will not smell any of the other truffles we find, and asks to ensure that no truffle touches any of his food while we're in Italy.
The takeaway: Kids love dirt. Truffles? Not so much.
| | | Visiting the town of Lucca | | | Another cathedral. William has been to more cathedrals this trip than he's been in churches his entire life. And it's here that he begins asking questions - "What are those pictures for?" "Why is the ceiling so high?" I try to explain the Christian god and religion generally in hushed tones while he studies ornate floors and arched ceilings. I'm not sure if we're raising a future art historian or if he was just tired of chasing pigeons, but I'll take it.
The takeaway: You'll never know what will pique your kid's curiosity. | Staying at the agriturismo | We make it back to Agriturismo Biologico Diacceroni as dusk is falling. The roads there are windy and narrow, and the hills are lavender in the fading light. Just outside our apartment, there's a small playground, and I watch the kids bump into each other and trip over holes in the ground while my wife, Danielle, cooks the pasta we'd bought from a market somewhere near Lucca.
Once Danielle has finished cooking, I hustle the kids inside. We each take our seats and eat like we do back home, talking about our day, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the pigeons.
The takeaway: Kids need similar routines on trips to the ones they have at home - but they're all the more special together in a new place. | | | Photography credits: Alexander Howard/Lonely Planet | This email was sent to you by: | Lonely Planet Publications Ltd. | 1101 Red Ventures Drive, Fort Mill, SC 29707 | | | |
