Parenting Archives - asthejoeflies

Nov 13 2017

Theorycrafting miles and points travel with three kids

I have a colleague who cites travel as one of the reasons for not having a second child. I totally get it, the more kids you have, the more difficult travel becomes. So, truth be told, travel was one of the major considerations on my mind before we went for three. What will travel with three kids look like?

So, this post contains the travel complications I considered that a third child might create. I won’t say that these concerns would ever have prevented us from going for it, but I definitely paused to think. Ultimately, we decided that we’d having a third child was more important to us than keeping our travel lives at status quo – the last two weeks have only made me feel more confident about that!

After each complication, I’ve also theorycrafted a bit about how to deal with these complications. Obviously experience trumps theory, so if you travel with three kids (or more!) and want to share tips, I’m all ears in the comments. Thanks!

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Concern 1: Cost of air travel with three kids

Cost of air travel (and travel in general) tops the list of most family’s concerns. And obviously we’re a travel hacking family that doesn’t really pay for flights with cash. I’ve learned I don’t even need to pay for Disney World with cash!). Still, since we eventually need to procure tickets for five people, even I’m beginning to worry about budget.

We happily have met our goal of taking 2-3 domestic vacations and one big international vacation ever year even since we had our first child. I basically earn enough points through credit card sign up bonuses and some light MS to cover the cost of all these flights.

However, our last trip to Hong Kong DID cost 420,000 miles – that was only three tickets in Cathay Pacific business class. That same trip, without devalutions (no guarantee), in two years will cost 700,000 miles!

Are you a large family preparing to travel with three kids? There's a lot to worry about, from cost to logics. Here are ideas to deal with the added stress! — I am seeing a lot more Jetblue in our futures

Theorycrafting solutions for cost of air travel

My goal remains unchanged – two or three domestic trips and one big international trip per year. Since I want the kids to get to Hong Kong or Taiwan (preferably both) every couple of years, here are my plans for how to make it happen.

1 – Hoard more: it’s going to be impossible to fly in business class if I don’t hoard more miles

2 – Fly one way in coach for European vacations if necessary: I really want that business class when we go to Asia and will save miles to Europe if need be. Those flights are pretty short, like flying to California, anyway.

3 – Take more road trips. This should save me some miles in the long run.

4 – MS a little more. Honestly, with 3 kids, I barely have the time, but if I need to, I can do this in a pinch to top off accounts.

5 – Lean on cash equivalents like US Bank Flexperks for domestic travel. This should save my transferable miles for the big redemptions!

Concern 2: Hotel room occupancy for travel with three kids

If you follow me on Twitter, you know I got slightly involved in the Deal Mommy and Pizza in Motion’s “spat” about hotel status. In their discussions they hit on one of my major travel concerns about a third child, hotel room occupancy. I used to maintain Hyatt Diamond (now Globalist status) for the confirmed suite upgrades.

I found, however, that both the Hyatt Regency Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong and the Hyatt Regency the Churchill base level suites have a room occupancy limit of 3. So I had to lie/talk my way into those suites when we were a family of four, I imagine things will just get worse now.

Theorycrafting solutions for hotel room occupancy

1 – Look to apartment rentals/AirBnB more. We already have moved in this direction since having a kitchen is indispensable for young kids, I expect us to move further in this direction

2 – Earn more cash back. (To pay for #1)

3 – Book adjoining rooms more often. This will especially work at low category hotels with cheap redemption costs

4 – Bring the grandparents and “assign” one of the kids to their room

5 – Contact hotels in advance to explain our situation and try to get a room that works for us (or leniency on occupancy). The worst they can say is no!

Concern 3: Uncontrollable chaos

“You get to play zone defense now.” I’m not sure how many times I’ve heard that since we started telling people we were expecting our third child. Even more people say it now post birth. Well, in my limited understanding of sports, zone defense usually means you just leave one person wide open.

Travel with kids can be chaotic, travel with three kids could very well be a nightmare. When they’re young, you’ve got conflicting nap times/schedules/interests. When they’re teenagers, you probably just have conflict!

Theorycrafting solutions for uncontrollable chaos

1 – Bring grandparents.

2 – Survive.

Honestly, I’m not sure what you can do about this. Chaos is chaos, and personally I don’t mind it. I know travel will be chaotic (it already is!), but despite the chaos we still find family travel incredibly rewarding. So I’m not gonna sweat this one TOO much.

Concern 4: Length of travel and locations for travel with three kids

One of the very few things I miss about not having children is the ability to get away for long, or even short, weekends. With miles and points plus the litany of fare sales, we used to be able to get away to Europe for a long weekend. Three kids and a dog has made that near impossible. And while it’s possible to take a child for a solo trip, we probably can’t take long weekend trips until the kids are older.

We also need to be picky about locations now. If we want to use miles and points to book hotels, Hyatt usually is easiest but they have the smallest footprint. Apartments often allow us to stay put in one place for one week, which helps with travel stress and also gives us the chance to really get to know a location.

Theorycrafting solutions for length of travel and locations

1 – Focus short weekend trips on domestic road trips or destinations less than three hours away, preferably avoiding time changes of greater than one hour.

2 – Even overseas, look for apartments where we can stay for a good amount of time

3 – To pay for 2, invest more in cash back

4 – When switching time zones for international travel, stay in that time zone as long as possible to make the most out of the up front jet lag pain

Concern 5: Health

One thing we thought of before going for our third and one thing we think about all the time is health on the road. Obviously, the fear of something medically happening on the road never deters us but with three kids the odds of a sick child increase exponentially.

Then, of course, after we conceived there was a point where I was worried we might not get to travel at all. Until she was born, I wasn’t 100% sure what needs CC might have and whether they might preclude us from almost all travel. Going into the third child, I definitely already accepted that our family travel would never be the same again. But with the health curveball, I spent a good couple weeks wrestling with the possibility that we might not have any family travel at all anymore.

During that time, I came to two conclusions, one sort of trivial, one kind of deep.

My trivial conclusion, I kid you not, was that no matter what we were dealing with, I knew we could still take the family to Disney World. I know that probably sounds crazy to people who could not care less about Disney, such as my wife. But Disney World remains one of my favorite places to visit, and I’ve seen first hand how well Disney deals with kids with special needs. Yes, Disney at the end of the day is a corporation, but the ground level cast members dealing with kids with special needs are simply spectacular. I found comfort in the fact that my family could still take that particular trip no matter what.

My deeper conclusion was more of a reminder. I love traveling and I love traveling with my family. The prospect of possibly losing that hurt. Of course, my family itself is more important than travel, but it took the possible loss to remind me how much I love travel itself. (For the record, it was a risk I was willing to take to have a third child).

Thankfully, everything worked out well enough that our travel shouldn’t be greatly affected (if at all). But I appreciate our chance to travel more than ever now.

Theorycrafting solutions for health issues while traveling

1 – Make sure we pack all necessary medications including children’s tylenol, benadryl, bandaids, etc.

2 – Have a general idea of where to go for medical help if necessary wherever we go

Final Thoughts

Sorry to get a bit deep at the end there, guess I’m still processing. Overall, I feel like we’ve mentally prepared as much as we can for travel with three kids. Now, it’s time to do it! Since we’ve mostly got all the medical stuff squared away, I’m looking forward to planning my trips as these miles and points burn a hole through my pocket.

Like I said up top, if you are a family of five or more, I’d love to hear your tips for traveling in a four person family tailored world. Miles and points tips, general travel tips, I’m all ears, hit me up in the comments!

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Oct 31 2017

On expectations, disappointment, hope, and parenting

Life sometimes throws you curveballs when you least expect it. This blog normally doesn’t address said curveballs unless they happen 30K feet in the air or in a different country. But when life threw us our curveball, it came in the form of polydactly for our third child. I scoured the internet looking for encouragement, similar experiences, and answers, but came up almost empty. So, if you’ll indulge me, I hope people who may need it find this post and find it encouraging. At the very least, hopefully any of you who are parents can relate to some of the stuff I share.

Now I don’t want to bury the lede, everything has for the most part worked itself out – I had played around with the idea of writing more “live” updates, but ultimately decided against it. So this post has been six months in the making and is a lot of rambling. Feel free to ignore.

Update Feb 2023: In case anyone happens upon this, it’s been almost five years since our daughter had minor surgery (general anesthesia) to remove her extra digits. She is healthy and well and we are so thankful – rereading this post five years later reminds me of all the anxiety and worry we had and how we take for granted the relatively easy times we have now. Parenting, amirite?

Expectations and surprises

I should start by saying, Jess and I feel lucky and blessed. There was a time when we weren’t sure whether we would have any children, and now we have three for the most part wonderful children. (Like all children, they can sometimes be turds.) Conceiving and the expectations around having a family are incredibly stressful in and of themselves, and while we’ve personally been there, that’s not what this post is about.

By the time we decided to go for a third child, we were already at peace with our family as is. In fact, I thought it pretty likely that we might not conceive, and I was okay with that. Of course, like I said, life throws curveballs and all of a sudden we were expecting way ahead of schedule. Everything was awesome.

Our baby passed some initial blood tests and so we cruised into our ultrasound on May 22. It’s tough to explain how awesome life was felt walking into the hospital at 9 AM that morning. My plan for the day was to see my baby, have a nice lunch with my wife, and then fly to Disney World for the Traveling Dad retreat and Pandora grand opening media event. #blessed, as they say.

The night before, I joked with Jess that as long as the baby had ten fingers and ten toes it’d be all good.

Woops.

I literally fell asleep for two minutes during the ultrasound. Seen one ultrasound, seen them all. (To be fair they measure the head size for a long time). But at some point I opened my eyes and blurted out, “That looks like a lot of toes!” The technician didn’t say anything but I started to have a sinking feeling in my stomach.

About twenty minutes later, the doctor came in and matter of factly said, “The technician said you noticed extra digits on the baby. I can confirm that she has four extra digits, one on each appendage, pinky side for all.”

The next hour or so was a blur. We went to speak to a genetic specialist who said that polydactyly, the medical term for extra digits, could be associated with a whole other host of genetic issues or defects. We answered the question “Is there any history of this in your family?” about ten times. (No, there isn’t.)

They asked us if we wanted to do further genetic testing on the baby, but when we found out that there was little chance we’d find out any actionable intel, we declined it.

I’m not sure how to describe how I felt that day. If you are a parent, you probably know the feeling. It felt as if I had been punched in the gut, and not in a “Mets lost the World Series” sort of way, but in a “Holy crap the rest of our lives might not be what we expected” sort of way.

That punch in the gut evolved into a litany of fears and questions. What if the baby has other issues? Will she have a difficult life? How will that affect our other children? And on and on and on…

Mourning our expectations

We cried a lot that first week. Babies are so innocent and vulnerable, it broke our hearts to think about any extra pain, suffering, or difficulty our child might have to endure. What happened over the next couple months, I now recognize as mourning our expectations.

When you conceive, you expect that you will have a perfectly healthy child who will be a blessing to your family. Sure, you may be afraid something might be wrong if you’re pessimistic like I am, but deep down you expect everything will be okay.

Well, when we found out everything was not okay, it sent me into a bit of a tailspin for awhile. I ended up going on the Pandora trip a day late, but the whole time I just couldn’t get over the fact that our daughter had tetra-polydactyly. I mean, there is so much to worry about.

Will people look at her weird?

Will I look at her weird?

What if she has those rare genetic diseases?

If she has surgery as a baby, what are the risks associated with that?

So yeah, I cried a lot. We cried together. We cried with friends and family.

Slowly, but surely, we mourned our original expectations for our child and gave them up to God. Slowly, but surely, we reminded ourselves that she was our daughter and we would love her no matter what. And slowly, but surely, we resolved that like for all of our children, we would do the very best we could for her as her parents, regardless of what might come. We prepared ourselves for the fact that our lives might be far different from what we may have envisioned, and that would be okay.

There were three major turning points that got me right, personally. The first was a Bible verse I heard not long after we found out: “People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart”. To be honest, when I heard it, I still wasn’t ready for that message – I can’t explain just how gutted I was about the whole situation at first.

Secondly, I found a Facebook group with parents of polydactyly. It was the first time I ever thought the existence of Facebook was a good thing. It really comforted me to hear the stories of other parents, even the tragic ones. As I shared these stories with Jess, it made us feel less alone. Although the group was only 250 people, we knew there were others who had gone before us. (A single extra digit happens about 1 in 10,000 babies, but tetrapolydactly, all four, is incredibly rare).

And the final turning point for me was a conversation I had with my daughter over the summer. We decided not to tell her beforehand, so she had no idea what was going on. But one day I was driving her home for school or going for a walk or something, and she said to me, unsolicited, “When the baby comes, she is going to be perfect. Just perfect.” From the mouths of babes.

A quick aside

A quick aside, because I don’t know where to put this, but even though I’m generally a sharer, I quickly stopped telling people about our situation. I just felt like I couldn’t handle people’s responses, even though they were all so sincere and kind.

“I’m sorry” just sort of rang hollow for me. I also felt bad putting people in the situation where they had to think of something to say, so I just avoided the situation altogether.

It also got super weird when people were like “Congratulations you’re having a baby that’s so exciting!” and part of me wanted to be like “Well, actually…there are some minor and potentially major issues so let’s just hold off on the excitement.” Anyway, the whole thing was just weird and difficult, so I just stopped sharing. If this hadn’t happened, I probably would have been talking about how excited I was over social media all summer. (And I was incredibly excited after I had finished processing the situation!)

Hope and parenting

While we mostly came to peace with everything before the baby was born, obviously our fears crept up from time to time. Waiting is so hard, especially if you don’t know exactly what’s on the other side.

But in the end, the whole polydactyly thing just reminded me that this is parenthood. You do the best for your kids with the things that you can control. You hope for the best for your kids when it comes to the things that you can’t. And if things don’t go according to plan for the things outside of your control, you loop back around and do the best that you can for your kids in those difficult situations.

Thankfully, when CC was born, she didn’t seem to have any issues outside of the extra digits. But even then, we had to decide how to handle them, should she keep them, should she have some removed in the nursery, should we schedule her for surgery as a baby? All tough, soul crushing decisions if I’m being honest.

And we made some decisions, and some things went wrong, and so we looped back and made some more decisions. We’ve been to the doctor more in the first week than we had been for our other kids, but that’s just the new normal. There are no do-overs in parenting, so we’re just doing the best we can and hoping for the best.

I expect plenty more heartbreak and stress as our kids grow older. I never understood until I was a parent just how much you get wrapped up into this thing that is your child. You want to protect them forever but ultimately they’re not yours to protect. And ultimately, it is a privilege and a blessing to be a parent, full stop.

So yeah, life is going to throw a ton of curveballs, and you probably won’t be ready, as a person or as a parent. You just gotta make up your mind, take your swing, and hope for the best. That’s what Jess and I aim to do from here on out.

Note: If you’re a new parent of a child with polydactyly or just want to reach out in general, please feel free to contact me any time via e-mail (asthejoeflies@gmail.com) or Twitter. We’re all in this together.

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May 28 2017

Hong Kong Revisited: Breaking all the parenting rules in Hong Kong

Raising kids in America means being subjected to a large set of rules about what’s safe and best for your children. I semi-religiously adhere to these rules – car seat height and weight limitations, proper etiquette, acceptable tactics for disciplining your children, etc. etc. Most of these “rules” probably reduce statistical probabilities from like 0.5% to 0.4%, but I try not to deviate too much from the norm. Traveling internationally, however, generally requires breaking parenting rules. Or at least bending them. Even if the international standard of the country we visit matches the US, sometimes practically it’s impossible to follow all the rules.

On our recent trip to Hong Kong, I was surprised to find it’s become a lot more baby friendly than our last visit in 2014. The MTR subway system looks to be adding elevators to every single station unlike some other metropolitan cities (*cough cough* LONDON). It seems like car seats are being used more regularly, though they also seem ridiculously expensive. I saw a lot more strollers, too.

Every parent knows that sometimes you have to break parenting rules, especially on the road. Here are some of the rules we had to bend/break in Hong Kong. — It seems car seats are much more prevalent in Hong Kong now, though still nothing like the US

Still, like I said, practically, we ended up bending and breaking a lot of parenting rules on our trip. To me, it’s something that just happens on vacation and I’m okay with it. But feel free to judge me if you’d like – we all parent in our own ways. I’d also love to hear what family and parenting rules you bend or break when on vacation, overseas or otherwise. So check out my list and let me know in the comments!

Eating – eat whatever you want, whenever you want

I’d say in terms of strictness, I’d rank us above average amongst American families. It definitely helps that my daughter didn’t realize she enjoyed ice cream until she turned 4 (that’s not an exaggeration). She still doesn’t enjoy the taste of chocolate. But my wife makes sure they eat organic things or whatever and I try not to share my chips with them so we both do our part.

With toddler jet lag and the foreign environment, we got very lax about eating. Everything of course started on the 15 hour flight to Hong Kong. When our kids are cranky, the easiest way to placate them is with food and we did that in spades. Noodles on demand (from the airline) and crackers on demand (from us) meant that we fed our kids quite a bit. You have to make compromises to survive a flight like that so we did.

This continued in Hong Kong as we found our son didn’t have much of an appetite while jet lagged. That meant he got a ton of calories from crackers the first couple of days. Not ideal, but we did it to survive. At meals we didn’t make a big deal about “trying everything” until the kids were better adjusted. To be honest, my thinking went something like this: “Should he be eating so many crackers…….oh shoot he’s rolling on the ground better give him a cracker!” For my daughter: “Hmm…if I let her eat this sour patch kid she will let me close my eyes for two minutes.”

So yeah, all of our eating restrictions went out the window and I don’t regret it one bit.

Night time routines – we’ll do whatever it takes

Building on the food thing, general best practice dictates that people not consume food or drink after they brush their teeth. Crazy, I know. Well, one thing I decided after taking my son for a walk at 2 AM through the streets of Causeway Bay was that I’d do whatever it takes to get him to rest. So although I put him to bed at his regular time, I prepared myself for him to wake up in three hours. Same with my daughter.

By hook or by crook, I would get H as much sleep as possible. One night that meant standing up with him in the carrier. It meant co-sleeping with him every night (which I love doing by the way but he will have none of it at home, so haha sucker!). It meant giving him milk at night to calm him down. I may or may not have given him crackers at 3 AM one night, I honestly could not tell you. I definitely showed him a video (La Luna, I think) hoping he would fall asleep watching it (he did not).

A lot of this was because of his jet lag. As he adjusted, I broke the rules less and less. By the end of the trip I only would give him water if he woke up in the middle of the night. So it’s not like if I took a three week vacation I’d let my kids eat cookies in bed, but at least during those first few days of adjusting, I let a lot of the rules go. And that was just fine.

Escalators – that’s not how you’re supposed to ride

Our most egregious rule breaking probably were riding escalators. Yes, Hong Kong has a ton of elevators and the MTR has made big strides. But our home MTR station, Causeway Bay, did not have an operational elevator because the station was under construction (I think to improve handicap access hilariously enough). They posted agents at the escalators telling you to take your kids out of strollers before riding. They also said if you need help you could call a phone number and people would come to carry you up and down (I think this was for wheelchairs).

Anyway:

So our kids rode their strollers up and down escalators quite a bit the week we were in Hong Kong. Am I proud of it? No. Would I do it again? Most probably definitely. If it’s 2 minutes up the escalator versus 12 minutes wandering around trying to find an elevator, I’ll likely take the 2 minutes every time.

Car seats – we don’t need no stinkin car seats

OK, that’s not really true. I would have loved to have a car seat. But since we planned on taking the MTR for most of the trip, we did not bring one. We brought a mifold (portable booster) for M but knew that H would mostly be going without. Now I’d probably never ride without a car seat in the States. If I’m being honest, it’s more because I don’t want to get a ticket. Which is probably why they give tickets!

But sometimes taking a taxi was the only option and so we rode with H in our laps. And, oops, sometimes we forgot or didn’t use the mifold too, so M was without a safety mechanism as well. It’s not something we enjoyed doing, but it’s something we did to make the trip smoother. I understand that some parents would never ever do that and I totally respect that. I’m certainly not recommending you forego car seats just because you’re traveling, but just being honest in admitting that we did.

Why I’m comfortable breaking parenting rules and why I consider you to at least consider bending them

“Rules are meant to be broken.” While I don’t necessarily believe that 100%, I do sort of operate that way in my normal life. Heck, isn’t that what travel hacking is all about? But I’ve learned a lot while parenting, and one thing I’ve realized is my ultimate lack of control over my children and their futures. When Jess was pregnant with our first, I was nervous all the time. What if something went wrong, what if I am a bad father, what if what if what if? Now that H and M are running around in this world, I have the illusion that I have a greater measure of control than I did when they were in the womb.

But really, we don’t. Parenting rules? They are ways to decrease the statistical probabilities of something bad happening, but nothing can bring those probabilities to 0. Parenting in general? Parenting is a way to increase the statistical probability your child will be a positively contributing, functional member of society, but nothing we do can make that probability 100.

So I’m comfortable breaking parenting rules because sometimes that’s the best option. Everything in life is a give and take. Walk 20 extra minutes to find the elevator but maybe your son will be so overtired they won’t eat and that’s bad for their nutrition. Milk might hurt their teeth at night, but lack of sleep might hurt them more. We can’t control everything. So I’m comfortable when I need to bend or break the rules because I know I’m just doing my best to put my children in the best situation possible for them. And yes, I am well aware that traveling internationally with these little kids comes with a bunch of cons – but I believe the pros outweigh them.

Anyway, bottom line is, we can only control so much and sometime we need to make compromises. That’s something I encourage all parents to do whether they are traveling or not. Parenting means meeting our kids where they are, and sometimes that means bending hard and set parenting rules at the very least.

Final Thoughts

Like I said, I’m not telling you to break the rules all the time. I’m just sharing that sometimes when we are on the road we let some of the rules go by the wayside, and I’m okay with that. I don’t think that makes me any worse of a parent (though I’m sure some others might think that!). I’d love to hear people’s thoughts in the comments. Are there rules you break with your kids when you travel? Or when you’re at home? Let me know, and let’s have a mature discussion about it.