You Couldn’t Pay Me Enough To Pack My Baby In A Car And Brave Thanksgiving Day Traffic

The holidays have always been my favorite time of year, hands-down, starting from my birthday in mid-October (yes, it’s a holiday!) on to New Year’s Eve. This is my season, y’all. But gone are the days when I can do anything I darn well please on the holidays, including dressing up like a slutty fill-in-the-blank on Halloween and traveling cross-country to eat a delicious turkey dinner.

Babies mess up plans. It’s just what they do. Navigating the holidays is even harder when you’re trying to time a turkey in the oven and stick to a baby’s nap schedule.

Speaking of nap schedules, how the eff is it even possible to travel sanely with a baby for more than 30 minutes during the holidays? Maybe other parents have a secret game plan that I’m not privy to (i.e., drugging their baby), but my first son is notorious for screaming at the top of his lungs in the car for the last 20 percent of any major road trip we take. Fun.

I’ve also nearly given myself a stroke blackout in one eye by twisting uncomfortably from the front seat into the back (while still wearing a seatbelt) to feed my hungry son a bottle en route. Most of the milk usually ends up spilled all over his face, and I poke him repeatedly in the eye with the nipple every time we hit a bump.

Somehow, we manage to get in the most ridiculous traffic gridlocks that add hours to our trip any time we travel with the entire family. At a dead stop on the highway, I’m usually praying for the baby to fall/stay asleep and for my toddler to stay interested in his sippy cup/shoelace/anything else I can chuck at him from the front seat.

I haven’t even factored in the actual packing for the trip. Even a short trip, say an hour, warrants a 2 to 3 page packing list for both kids, though my husband scoffs at me for this. (It gets results!) And without fail, I always manage to forget something fairly important, like baby food, a pack n’ play, or a booster seat, making the juggling of the holiday in a new environment all the more stressful.

Traveling with kids is a harrowing act on a regular day. It becomes even more ulcer-inducing when every family in town is trying to make it to Grandma’s on time for dinner.

Fortunately, all of my in-laws live within a 2 hour radius. My parents live slightly farther away (4 hours), and I made it crystal clear as soon as I popped out baby #2 that I wasn’t going to travel with 2 kids under 2 for any reason, barring an emergency, until the second child hit his first birthday.

We’re not there yet, which means we’ll be hosting all of the holidays at our house this year. This isn’t a totally radical plan because I love hosting get-togethers, so it’s a win-win for me. So far, the in-laws haven’t put up a fight about traveling to our home base since we have a bigger house and are willing to cook the turkey.

As for me, I’m reveling in the fact that I won’t have to step foot outside of my house on one of my all-time favorite holidays of the year.

Even though I’ve managed to pull the strings like an evil puppet master and execute Turkey Day on my terms, it still doesn’t make the dreaded baby/toddler nap schedule go away. I’ve thought about this backward and forward and have come up with a conclusion, no matter how insensitive it may be.

My sons are 22 months and five months. They won’t have a memory until they are three or four years old, right? After a long day of slaving away in the kitchen, I want to actually eat my amazing Thanksgiving spread without jiggling a baby on my knee or trying to cut up food for a toddler.

So, we’re going to have the main Thanksgiving meal during naptime. We’re going to eat like grown-ups and have a few cocktails””all without interruption. When the kids wake up, we can give them their own Thanksgiving plates at snack time, and they’ll never know what they’re missing.

As for holiday travel with an infant and a toddler, don’t even think about asking. I’d rather eat Thanksgiving dinner alone with just my husband and two (sleeping) kids than sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way to a holiday meal.

I told myself that I’d be okay with travel invitations after baby #2 turns one next year. But if this holiday goes well, I may try to milk the traveling-with-kids excuse as long as I can””until the in-laws complain or the kids are old enough to drive.

(Photo: getty images)