We once spent a sizeable amount of money taking our children to see a genuinely spectacular fireworks display on New Year’s Eve. Boats on the harbour, light on the water, the whole sky on fire.
Ask my kids about that trip and they will tell you about the hotel luggage trolley.
Specifically, they will tell you about riding the luggage trolley down the corridor while their father pretended to be a bellhop with a bad French accent. That’s the memory. That’s what we flew four hours for. Monsieur Trolley.
Kids don’t remember the itinerary.
They remember the in-between.
{Tweet that.}
The longer I parent, the more I notice this pattern. We plan the highlights; they collect the margins. The big-ticket attraction becomes “fine,” but the stray cat outside the restaurant gets a name, a backstory, and a tearful goodbye. The five-star breakfast buffet is forgotten; the morning we ate cereal out of mugs on a balcony is legend.
At first this used to deflate me a little. All that planning! But I’ve come around to thinking it’s one of the best things about traveling with children. They are incapable of experiencing a holiday through its brochure. They experience it through its details: the texture of things, the jokes, the small strange moments that don’t photograph well.
Actually, sometimes they do photograph well. When we put together the kids’ coloring books after that trip (we make one from our own photos after each holiday now), I let them each choose their own pages. I assumed they’d pick the fireworks. Not one of them did. My oldest chose the ferry. My middle one chose the stray cat, obviously. My youngest chose the luggage trolley photo, slightly blurred, her father mid-bow.
And you know what? Coloring those pages, they told the stories again, and the stories had grown. The cat had kittens now, apparently. The trolley went faster in the retelling. This is what kids do with the in-between moments we barely notice: they keep them, water them, and grow them into family folklore.
So we’ve changed how we travel, a little. We still plan the highlights, I can’t help myself, but I hold them loosely, and I keep my eyes on the margins. When my kids linger on a moment, however small, I linger with them now. The fireworks last twenty minutes.
Monsieur Trolley, it seems, is forever.
A travel memory colouring book made from your own photos can give those in-between moments somewhere to live. Let the kids choose some of the pages—their picks will surprise you, and those are usually the pages they colour first.
