Kyoto, Japan: It’s 5:00 in the morning and your 9-month-old is more interested in coo-ing than snoozing. This is a classic traveling-with-kids moment because you now have to choose to either 1) slowly go insane worrying about waking others, run out of your ryokan (Japanese traditional inn) screaming, and spend the rest of your life deranged and singing karaoke for change on the street corners of Japan or 2) simply take advantage.
This very scenario happened to Marisa and me on our second major “globetotting” trip. Our first-born, Noah, was wide-awake way too early in the morning and Marisa was still beat from being on mom-duty all night. So instead of going Loco in Kyoto (sounds like a good south-of-the-border action movie to me), I grabbed the little man, our Kelty Pack, and my camera and we headed out to explore the cultural capital of Japan at daybreak. The results were breathtaking. With no one out but the sun peeking over the rooftops, we stumbled into everything from picture perfect alleys filled with brightly colored doorsteps adorned with bonsai and ancient bicycles to one of Kyoto’s newest shrines, Heian Jingu, which boasts one of the largest torii (shrine gate) in Japan.
So when traveling with small children, here’s the golden nugget to grasp so you don’t lose sleep over the trivial: your children deserve to be on vacation just as much as you. When was the last time you tried teething or learning to walk? That’s as hard as any nine to five desk job, and it deserves some paid time off. This means allowing your kids to be on vacation from their sleep schedule as well as everything else. Instead of fretting over missed naps, late nights or early mornings, bask in the randomness of everyone’s internal clock and I promise you’ll enjoy yourself a whole lot more.
For Noah and I that morning, his off-kilter sleeping schedule allowed a glimpse into a heritage (Noah’s heritage in fact, since he’s a quarter Japanese) that we otherwise might have missed. Unobscured by any other distraction, the city itself seemed to whisper to us as we reverently passed through its streets. We marveled at the delicacy of the streets and homes, windows into a culture centuries older than our own. We were awed by the humble grandeur of the Heian Jingu shrine, with its brilliant blue tiled roofs and glowing orange framework. We finished by silently paying our respects at a prayer tree: its brilliant white shards of fabric filled with poetic pleas gently lifting towards the heavens in the morning breeze. This was awe-inspiring. This was tear-jerkingly awesome. This never would have happened had I not been traveling with the best 9-month-old tour guide the world has ever known, who was now snoozing in the Kelty Pack.
