We have lots of friends who travel with their kids. One girlfriend of mine took her son to Australia, for crikey’s sake, when he was only a year and a half old. Other friends of ours took their two young sons to Paris, and most of my friends from my old Mommy-And-Baby group have at least taken their kids for a few nights to Quebec City or Montreal or Halifax.
I can’t seem to even get it together enough to take all three of them camping. Or to the Papanack Zoo. Or to IKEA.
Sir Monkeypants and I are really starting to feel like we need to try a few simple family trips, just to wet our feet and get over the fear. It doesn’t help that three times a year, we make the epic journey to Southern Ontario to visit our families. It’s a long, tiring trip that doesn’t leave us with a lot of energy for even more travelling during the rest of the year. However, there are so many other fun, exciting things we could be doing with our kids, memories we could be making with them, and we feel like we should be doing more.
I was just looking at DaniGirl’s photos of her trip to Lake Placid and my first thought was, “Ooh, that looks like fun.”
But my second thought was, “What the hell would we do about food?”
Almost all of our talk of vacations and trips, from Disneyworld down on through the Toronto Science Centre, comes down to a food issue. We aren’t sure how we would feed Captain Jelly Belly while we are away. We live in fear of him eating something he’s allergic to, something that makes him sick, while we are hundreds of kilometers from home and away from the safety net of known doctors and hospitals and medicines.
How do other families with food issues travel? They can’t possibly stay home at all times. Do they pack a whole suitcase full of prepared foods? Do they always book a place with a kitchen, so they can make their own meals? Do they trust restaurants and fast food places when they are travelling, if the place assures them that there are no nuts/no wheat/no milk in whatever? Do they risk it?
I wonder. Melanie, Beck, XUP, anyone else? How do you feed your kids when you travel?
TurtleHead 
I’ve always travelled with my daughter and we either stay with people or in places with kitchens and then bring a big sack of staples or make sure there’s somewhere close by to purchase the things she can eat. One restaurant meal every couple of days is the most she can handle and we stick with high-end places who’ll make up something special for her. When she goes for sleepovers, she always takes something for her supper and breakfast, too. A good travel option for you might be a cruise. If you give them a list of things he can and cannot eat they will make up special meals for him — it’s one of their selling points.
Yeah, it looks pretty on paper, but I’ll be honest — it was a terribly stressful trip! (More on that in the PS post.) I’m so glad we don’t have any food issues, but I still felt horrible that the boys ate a steady diet of fries, pizza and hotdogs with nary a vegetable in sight.
FWIW, our first family trip was to Quebec City and while it was stressful and not quite as ideal as our trip to Bar Harbor, it did help us get over our fear of travelling with the kids. Until the third one came along, anyway! I keep telling myself, vacations in three years will be a breeze!!!
I must admit, my main worry when we travel is what to feed Calder. We take a certain amount of risk, and travel with two EpiPens.
If it’s a road trip, we take along lots of snacks, canned soup, already-cooked pasta, cereal and soy milk, and we try to stay in places that have a mini fridge and microwave. We’ve found that if a room doesn’t have a microwave, the hotel will sometimes bring one to your room.
On longer trips (a week or so), we’ve rented a house and prepared a lot of the meals ourselves.
We eat too much fast food when travelling because it’s fairly easy to find out about allergens. I keep a list of “ok foods” for various restaurants, and lists of ingredients to avoid in my Palm Pilot so that I can look stuff up quickly.
At “real” restaurants, we ask lots of questions. We’ve found that servers are usually really good about asking cooks about ingredients and preparation techniques, and they’ll often offer to make something special for him, though that happens more at non-chain places.
One of my pet peeves is that he’s usually allergic to most of the foods on kids’ menus, so he often ends up getting an adult entree and only eating a tiny bit of it.
BTW – Locally, we had a really good experience at Milestone’s (the location near Ikea). When we mentioned his allergies, the manager came over and explained the risks with certain menu items and recommended something for him. One of their cooks has a peanut allergy, so they’re pretty aware and accommodating. There wasn’t tons for him to choose from, but at least we felt safe.
XUP — I’m so happy to hear that you’ve been able to send your daughter on sleepovers. We’re still not at the point where we feel comfortable leaving the Captain at a birthday party, but we hope someday we can find a way to let him have an overnighter. And I’ll look into the cruise idea…personally I love it, I hope the hubby does too!
Dani — I agree, travelling in three years will be awesome for us both. I kind of want to just throw in the towel and wait until the Little Miss is three or four years old before going anywhere…but I guess we should bite the bullet sometime soon, you did!
Mel — Awesome suggestions all around. I didn’t know about the microwave/hotel thing — we will definitely use this when travelling — and the Palm Pilot list is a fantastic idea. Also sounds like we shouldn’t be afraid to try fancier places — right now we restrict ourselves to McD’s and Swiss Chalet because they are the only two places where we can get really good allergy info. We’ll check out Milestones and if you have any other suggestions for around Ottawa please send them along — we are desperate for places to get take-out and to eat-out at!
You could try any of the health food places: The Table, Green Door, etc.. they always list ingredients and offer lots of dairy-free, gluten-free, nut-free stuff. Licks, of course used to be a fine fast-food place to go, but they closed. I don’t know how you feel about sushi – but it’s one of my daughter’s favorites (veggie or regular). Japanese in general is usually pretty safe. The only thing I’m not crazy about with them is they use sugar in a lot of their stuff. You can ask for ingredient lists at any of the fast food places OR get a full ingredient list and menus online for any of them or any chains for if you’re travelling.