Episode 1 – Europe with young kids? WTF are we thinking…..

Well when we left you last time we had just had our first child. A lot has happened since then, including a second. And in true second child fashion while Emelia (our 1st) got a detailed, month by month blog (including the 2 part graphic birth scene) Olivia got little more than a draft sentence around the start of the 2nd trimester before the update was abandoned. Given she was such a terror as a child, perhaps the less written about that intervening period the better. I swear if she wasn’t so cute Krys would have found me one night trying to push Olivia back up from where she came from – like me trying to trigger a reality based variant on the Benjamin Button story…… Plus stories of me staring at my wife as two kids lose their sh#t around us and saying to her ‘f#ck I hate my life’ isn’t really the most solid basis for amusing anecdotes….

Anyway, we survived. And now that life is under control we’ve decided to do something reckless and take our two girls travelling for 4months. But now that we are on the cusp of leaving I realise there are a few locations on Earth that drive pure terror straight into my soul. The Westfield Miranda carpark is one. An all you can eat seafood buffet is another (seriously – have you seen how people lose all sense of dignity for a few extra prawns??). But a plane ride for 24hrs with 2 kids might just be the hell to top them all. And here we are staring it right in the face.

I want to get enough Phenergen to down a horse just for me – Krys doesn’t want to give it to the kids. But I intend to mix it with 6 quick scotches and see if I can become one of those online news stories that involves a man being met by security in Doha who took his pants off mid-flight then ranted aggressively about the poor choice of music by the JD’s niteclub dj (well it’s true. Who goes from Whitney’s ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ to Sir Mixalots ‘Big Butts’. Great way to kill a dance floor peanut).

We are genuinely curious / scared / excited / concerned about how the kids will take to the travel. I’m sure there will be some days when we hear the cry of ‘I want to go home’. In fact after a few weeks of just me and the kids I wouldn’t be surprised if Krys said the same thing. But given when the kids have started on the ‘I want, I want’ chant followed by some absurd request my response has always been ‘well I want to kiss Jessica Alba on the mouth and go surfing in Spain’. So given part of that dream sequence is about to become a reality, they better have a pretty good reason for wanting to go home early. To go home to watch back episodes of Peter Rabbit isn’t going to cut it.

Anyway, enough dribble from me as my wife watches me with a ‘wtf are you doing playing on your phone’ look as she packs bags for herself, the two kids, tidies the house and cleans out he fridge. I’d like to at least get into a different hemisphere before she considers ditching me – so off to finish packing. Next stop Barcelona!

Buenos noches!!

Trent, Krystal, Emelia, Olivia and a suitcase full of WTF are we doing…