Travel with kids * Megan * Central Asia

Series - "Travel with kids" is a series of posts from women who have traveled internationally (with their kids) and lived to tell about it. Hopefully their travel tips (and trials) will encourage and equip your family for adventures of your own.

Introduction - I led Young Life at my high school for a few years after I graduated from Texas A&M - Megan was one of my "girls"... and then one day I woke up and checked facebook and she was married with kids and living an amazing story on the other side of the world. It made me feel "oldish". It also made me thankful for technology and the ability to reconnect with friends all over the world. Megan and her husband Brock live in Central Asia with their three kids - Sawyer, Nash and Jones. You can read more about their adventure here.
 

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“Wow, your’re so brave, I could never do that!” Is the comment we get most often about living overseas with 3 little ones. Well, I’m here to tell you that we really aren’t that brave, and I bet, if you wanted to, you could do it too! 

I’m Megan and I am married to Brock. When we moved to Central Asia 15 months ago we had two children, Sawyer - now four and Nash- now two. We also decided to go the extra mile of crazy and added a third baby, Jones, to our family and he is now 2 months old. (I delivered him here and that is another hilariously crazy story you can find on our family blog.) About 2 years ago we were told about a job opportunity to move over here to coach American Football. We decided to come visit and after visiting and praying about it we decided to make the move. Prior to having kids we had done some overseas travel to Africa a couple of times and Haiti. My husband then decided to go back to school and get his MBA in order to hopefully start a business overseas one day. So, when he was offered this coaching job and we saw it as a perfect opportunity to get our foot in the door and make the move. These first 15 months (and the remainder of this year) will still be spent in heavy language learning with a little coaching on the side. As we finish up our second year here this coming summer we are hoping to possibly start the venture of opening up a Cross Fit Gym as well as get our football team out of the learning level and move them into the competition level. In a nutshell, that’s who we are and how we got here. I consider myself a normal stay at home mom who loves to craft and blog and shop at Target.  I consider us a normal family who loves to go on adventures or just stay in and have a movie night.  We now just happen to be doing all of those things oceans away from our family and friends, who we miss dearly! (Minus shopping at Target … curse the oceans that separate me from my love affair with that wonderful place.) 

So, just like any normal mother ;)  – at first, my biggest fear about moving overseas wasn’t the language barrier, or the grocery shopping. It wasn’t finding a car or a place to live (I left those concerns to my husband, ha) … it was the dreaded plane ride and travel to get here.  We had one 9.5 hour flight, a 4 hour layover, then a 4 hour flight, then a 3 hour layover, and then one last 1 hour flight before getting to our destination.  But, BUT! I am here to say that I was pleasantly surprised with how smoothly the travel went.  In the end I felt so silly that I had worried so much about the flight.  Here are some things that I think contributed to our (mostly) successful travel:

* If you are going to drug your children (guilty!), always test it before the big trip.  We tried Benadryl on both of our children during a long car trip before leaving the States.  It knocked our oldest out almost immediately and our youngest ended up wide awake and delirious for the entire 7 hour trip. All that to say, our daughter got Benadryl on the plane and our son ended up with a different sleep aid.

* If you have a child younger than 2, I highly recommend taking their car seat on the plane with you.  Our son (at the time he was 15 months) slept the majority of the 9.5 hour flight in his car seat.

* Stick to routine! Our flight left Stateside right at dinner time so we just followed our normal routine.  We boarded, ate our dinner, played for a bit, and then started changing the kids into their pj’s and reading our nighttime stories.  We had explained to them that we would be sleeping on the airplane and told them it was “nighttime”.  We put our son in his car seat, gave him is sleep aid, and he ended up sleeping for the next 4-5 hours.  Our daughter took a little longer to fall asleep, but I just put on a show for her and she ended up falling asleep soon as well.  It was very helpful that about 3 hours into our flight time was their bedtime!

* Shows, shows, and more shows.  We are not a big tv family – but you better believe during our travel that our kids were living it up in the entertainment department. 

* I also had a carryon full of snacks.  Yes, an entire carry-on bag filled with goldfish, nuts,  fruit snacks, granola bars, cheerios, and all of their other favorites.  We ended up not even eating half of this, but it was so helpful to have the first week or so after we had landed as well.

* I had another carry on (a backpack) full of gifts wrapped in tissue paper.  I had the gifts numbered and I had enough little gifts for our kids to open one each hour if we needed.  Most of these things (board books, play dough, coloring books, crayons, little action figures etc) I found in the dollar section except for  two “bigger” toys which were a Mr. Potato Head and a little Doctor kit bag.  We ended up not even needing to open half of these either  but my thinking was that if we were struggling then I could give them something to look forward to each hour by getting a new toy.  And the fact that they were wrapped added to the excitement as well as took some more time for them to unwrap it. 

* And my last piece of advice is patience and a happy face.  Because at the end of the day, you are going to get to your destination – you really are.  So if things are going badly try your best and just smile.  Although our travel experience was great – it wasn’t without meltdowns or stress.  These things are inevitable. Just try to laugh it off and keep making it through the hours. 

In the end, we made it and I lived to tell about it. Win, win for the book! Actually, we are heading back for the first time here in a few weeks (now with three children in tow) and although I can’t say I’m looking forward to it, I’m not dreading it like I did that first time. Will it be hard and exhausting – yes – but it will be worth it to get our family back to Texas to see our loved ones and spend 10 glorious weeks with them, just like it was worth it to get our family here. Our move was a big one – but overall we have loved living here. It has been the hardest 15 months of our life; saying goodbye to our amazing family and friends (the hardest for sure!), learning a new language, a new culture, having a baby, etc etc. But we have come out happier and stronger and with our faith stretched and grown more than we could have ever imagined. We aren’t sure what our future holds or how long we will be here. But for now, this is home and we have grown to love the people here. Sawyer is attending preschool in another language and thriving, our marriage is a normal one with bickering and fights – but we are so completely happy, our kids are being exposed to so much culture and diversity, we have grown to appreciate people, friends, and each other and the time we have together so much more, our extended family has been able to experience so much on their trips to visit us, and I could go on and on. There are, of course, a lot of obvious burdens about living life so far from everything you know...  But we are continuing to learn, every day, that the blessings abound as well.