Traveling With Children: The Diaper Diaries
You hear it often enough, biguns encouraging littluns: “Travel while you’re still young! Travel before you get locked into marriage and out of the world. Travel before you are a slave to a mortgage. Traveling with children is like traveling with an alcoholic and incontinent puppy, so travel before you make a baby! Travel before you are chained to a job as exciting as undercooked white rice.”
This is not bad advice. These are sentiments I’ve echoed. I’ve told the face in the mirror to hang onto his pickpocket proof traveling pants as long as he can. Before life will make him trade them for a pair of zebra striped zubas—the sort his dad wears in public to keep his family humble/humiliated.
A photo that encapsulates my father quite well.
Traveling With Children: An International Education
But then, sometimes on the road, you meet an intrepid family that is living out their offbeat life on the road without second guessing traveling with children. “Travel, is life” Matu told me when I came upon him walking a slackline he’d tied between two palms on the shores of Lake Nicaragua. A stone’s throw away was his home, the bus called El Bicho (which in Spanish means, bugger, not the word you were thinking).
Inside their cozy bus, Shanti sat with her daughter Zaina, homeschooling. The level of concentration made me suspect math was being taught. While other kids her age learn about the world in their geography class, she need only look out the window of her movable bedroom to experience life’s international opulence.
During our brief conversation, Matu’s face was raised in a permanent grin—the smile of ideals hanging on life’s line. Shanti, Matu, Zaina and Marta (their puppy) are out there now, traveling with children in their home which has housed them for eight years of voyaging throughout South and Central America. They make their means along the way by selling T-shirts, postcards, and a coffee table book with photos and descriptions of their travels.
From Granada, Nicaragua, El Bicho is headed north, their ultimate goal, Alaska. But they are in no hurry. It might be a year or so before they arrive, since they are playing a blissful game of chance, moving as quickly their merchandise moves.
While their vagabond lifestyle is not be for everyone, Matu and Shanti could not imagine living any other way. You can see it in every nuance of their expressions—this is a happy family sucking the marrow from their communal life.
That’s the affirmation their lifestyle lends itself to—not to follow their lead, but to live a life that’s uniquely you. To throw out all the old maps, ignore the cookie cutter careers sitting on the shelf, erase the whiteboard of expectations and live every day humming the song you and your loved ones have composed.
