How to Fit a Car Seat on a Camel

We traveled by plane, train, and automobile (the "automobile" in question being our "Kids? What kids?" cream convertible Beetle). We journeyed for business and pleasure. We vacationed en masse and à deux. We partook in all activities we could think of, from off-Broadway theater and holistic spa days to snowboarding and surfing. We danced 'til dawn in San Francisco and spent lazy mornings enjoying brunch with the newspaper.

In that last prekids year, with every trip we took we'd look at each other and say, with a mixture of query and reassurance, "We can still do all this with the baby, you know. . . ." Yeah, we were that cliché, too: the couple who assumes that our baby, born into a mobile world, will automatically become a mobile baby, fitting neatly into our universe in his/her hipster pouch/sling/backpack, scaling Mount Kilimanjaro with us with nary a peep about altitude sickness.

Ha! Sure, you can travel with a kid. Just don't expect it to be quite the same. In the year after Jonah was born, we held on to our determination to keep on traveling. Okay, so packing for a trip now took a week rather than half an hour, interspersed with algorithm-defying calculations of the precise number of diapers required for a ten-hour plane journey, and just how long a three-hour road trip would really take once we'd factored in nursing breaks. The New Yorker and the iPods were replaced by Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? and Philadelphia Chickens.

Still, we got out and about—by the time Jonah was a year old, he'd crossed the Atlantic four times, been up to Whistler, B.C., for a week, and taken several weekend minibreaks within Washington State. Not quite the same pace as in the in utero months, but not bad. The destinations themselves, however, were only half the story. As any parent will tell you (and did tell us; not that we listened), traveling with a wee one is the time in which the old saying "It's the journey, not the destination, that matters" really comes true. Getting to your destination can be an adventure in and of itself.

Our own experiences of the pre- and postbaby trips made me hungry to hear how others had fared. In yet another cliché of our generation, the individualist in me was keen to find company; surely we weren't the only people for whom the word "vacation" had entirely changed in significance postkids?

The women in this collection answered this question with a resounding "No!", and then some. They proved that not only was I not alone, but that I wasn't even remotely intrepid. Sarah Davies takes the concept of "baby's first flight" to new extremes in her story of flying a two-seater plane across Arizona with her three-month-old as copilot. Elena Aitken braves the high seas in a thirty-nine-foot sailboat with toddler twins, an arrangement that can make any mother shudder in anticipation of all that could go wrong. And Amy Bustraan, in a tale sure to make the most hardened outdoors folk pause, kayaks the rapids with her six-month-old daughter bobbing along in her booster seat.

Sometimes the trips occurred out of necessity rather than careful planning. Julie Barton's tale of "baby's first road trip," involving her premature son, abreast pump with a life of its own, and a freeway full of truckers, is as poignant as it is hilarious. In the same vein, Susan Wolter Nettell tells of taking a six-hundred-plus-mile midwinter train journey from Minnesota to South Dakota with preemie quads, helping her younger sister, the newly overwhelmed mother, bring her babies home. Both of these journeys make for equally touching and hair-raising reading. And as unforeseen road trips go, not many beat Donna Collins Tinsley's story of fleeing Hurricane Frances with a toddler, three teenage daughters, and a motley assortment of pets.

In other cases, trips were not spontaneous events but the result of careful forethought—and still result in outcomes that have us howling in despair and delight. Julia Litton's "Consider Atlanta" will have many readers nodding in rueful recognition with her account of the Thanksgiving trip that almost wasn't, a theme that continues with true Christmas holiday style in Holly Korbey's "Seven Bags, Two Kids, and the Baby Cheeses" and Mary Jane Beaufrand's "Flashdance Snow White."

It seems that there's no end to the variety of situations that can spell disaster when traveling with your beloved offspring. Staying close to home and re-creating the vacations of your own childhood or taking your little darlings to favorite haunts doesn't stave off the mishaps, as Sally Bjornsen, Sabra Ciancelli, and Elizabeth Roca show us. Going abroad just adds a different element of the unexpected to the trip, whether it's in Laos (Willow King), Ecuador (Gabrielle Smith-Dluha), or Niger (Jennifer Margulis). Even a visit to Graceland can be cringe-inducing when one of your party is determined to point out just how dull he finds The King, as Tiffany Fitch's hilarious "All Shook Up" recounts.

Traveling with young children, then, is really an embodiment of the broader life changes that occur when you move from "person" to "parent." Your destination, journey times, suitcase contents, are all determined by the needs of someone other than yourself. Moreover, your own enjoyment of the trip depends on getting these details right in the face of eternal variables. For those of us faintly hoping that travel becomes easier when the wee ones turn into bigger ones and are able to actually appreciate their surroundings and the gift of travel, think again. The sagas related by Dana Standish, Donna Gephart, and Ivy Eisenberg demonstrate all too clearly that preteens and teenagers can be just as "interesting" to travel with as the weenies, even if Dora the Explorer has been swapped for the Paris edition of Vogue.

In recent years, gas prices notwithstanding, Americans have been traveling more and more. In 2006, 38.3 million people were estimated to have traveled more than fifty miles for Thanksgiving week alone. That's a lot of people traveling with a lot of children. Overseas travel is also on the rise. In 2005, nearly 2.9 million American residents traveled to foreign destinations with their children, according to statistics from the Office of Travel and Tourism Industries. Clearly, despite the pain of packing, despair at the destination, and the obstreperous offspring, travel with our families offers us something valuable that we just can't get at home.

That mysterious something can be found throughout these stories, even among the more hideous details of projectile vomit and frantic potty stops: Traveling, very simply, makes indelible memories that, for better or for worse, are the stuff of family bonding. Think about your own childhood for a moment, and I' ll guarantee that you'll start to giggle (or groan) at a long-hidden remembrance of a particularly painful trip or a recurring journey you were forced to make each year, which has now become as integral to your formative years as learning your ABCs.

As our kids grow bigger and more independent, those opportunities to spend quality time with them become fleeting (even if that quality at the time may seem substandard at best!), and we're glad to have had these chances, however cobbled together they were. Stephanie Sylverne, telling of her two-single-mothers-three-kids-and-a-grandfather road trip, touches on the realization that this moment of motherhood will never again be captured or possible—the sense of freedom that comes with spontaneity, and the joys of sharing a twenty-four-hour cross-country car journey and all, with our children. And further afield, on a trip to Germany, J. Anderson Coates articulates the impulse that drives so many of us to make seemingly impossible trips with our young ones; to re-create a memory from our own childhoods; to give to our children what our parents gave to us, be it a sense of wonder, otherness, or simply the feeling of being surrounded by friends and relations for key times in our lives. Certainly this is true of my own family's experience. Trips "home" to the U.K. stopped being merely fun diversions in our hectic urbanite lives and became somehow necessary to the fabric of our family life. Our sense that Jonah needed to know (even at three months) what English countryside looked like and to spend time in his grandparents' homes superceded any horror at the prospect of twenty-one hours of travel time, sixteen hours of jetlag, and ten-thousand-plus miles of travel in a one-week period.

Traveling with kids is undeniably messy, frustrating, and chaotic. But so, too, is life with kids; and if we distill it even further, life itself; and so the memories become a part of our life, and keep us moving forward. As does the sneaking suspicion that once the kids are old enough to be left home and we can travel solo again, we'll have a strange feeling that someone's missing.