Traveling with Kids II

I wrote a while ago about my niece and nephew who did not comprehend the idea of traveling. For them it was nothing more then hoping on a plane, and the plane was the same to them as a short car trip was to me when I was their age. Like I said before, I am not sure how that can be corrected. It is kind of like how my Grandmother (she is in her upper 90’s) can not get over when I call her in the states from Europe. She always says, “it sounds like you are next door!” It is always an exciting thing for her to get a call from me. Whereas I do not find it odd or really different from any other phone call. In fact, I would probably think that it is more odd to get a call from my neighbor then I would from a different continent.

The reason that I bring it up again is that my niece and nephew (along with their parents and grandmother) flew over last week. N had her baptism and my sister (their mother) was the godmother. Of course the kids love N and were so excited to see her.

The kids did really well. J (the 5 year old boy) was so excited about the trip that he could not sleep the night before the trip and A (the 8 year old girl) could sleep but did not stop talking about it the week before the trip. They did excellent on the flight, from what I was told. When they arrived in Sweden, everyone was exhausted…except for the kids.

So what did we do to try and make it special for the kids- so they understood that they were on a “real trip”. First I have to give A’s teachers a lot of create. A is in 2nd grade and had to skip school for a week in order to come. One of her assignments was to keep a journal for everyday that they were here. One of her teachers has a Swedish background, so the pressure was on! For the most part she did well with keeping up with the journal writing.

M and I knew that she was going to have to keep the journal and it was both of the kids birthday when they were here. So we played with that. For A’s birthday gift, we got her a Swedish/English dictionary and journal. For J, we got him a journal and some markers to draw and write what he experienced.

Here are a couple other ideas that we did:

- Bought a coloring book in Swedish and translated all the instructions to English. The kids are going to bring them home to share with their classes.
- Tried Swedish foods like Swedish meatballs with lingon berry jam
- Learned how to saw a few key Swedish words like hi, goodbye, thank you, and how to count to 10.
- Used a comparison of ages when explaining things (this University started in 1477, that is 18 years before Columbus set sail for America)
- Took the train and the ferry for transportation instead of driving, which was a big hit!

I am sure that we did more then just this, but though I still do not think that the kids understood totally that they were in a different country, they did to a certain extent. In the end, they had a good time and will have wonderful memories of the trip.