Tips for Traveling with Children: Part 2/3

Complementary Continental breakfast Etiquette

1. Remind children to walk, wait in line, use their inside voice, and refrain from picking up and setting down five different spoons before choosing one.

2. Don’t even try to eat a bowl of Fruit Loops unless you’re okay with your child having a bowl.

3. Always allow your eighteen-month-old to lick jam off bread, because, why not, it's vacation.

4. While everything tastes better when you are camping, this rule does not apply to complimentary continental breakfasts, especially not to white plain bagels, and instant oatmeal.

5. Try not to wonder too hard at the folks who at additional cost, order hot breakfast, when there’s an all-you-can-eat breakfast already provided for free.

6. It’s best to clear your plates, bowls, cups, and trash before going back for seconds, or thirds. That way only the most observant of your fellow guests will realize you’re probably eating more than you should.

Attending the Children’s Museum

1. If visiting the children’s Museum on the same day as the Natural History Museum, do the Natural History Museum first—bones and bugs don’t hold a candle to water rooms, life-size excavators, and fake forest playgrounds.

2. If you have to choose between keeping your eye on the four-year-old or the eighteen-month-old, always choose the eighteen-month-old (Of course, if you do lose the eighteen-month-old, chances are he’s in the ball room).

3. When playing in the children’s village grocery store, never put a rubber chicken under your shirt and pretend to steal it. Your child, and all the other children playing around you are likely to follow your lead and turn an innocent make-believe game of grocery shopping into an episode of “Cops.”

4. No matter how long you are at the Museum, even if it’s three hours of non-stop play, for your four-year-old it won’t be long enough, and when you get him in the car, he is liable to say, “I just want a chance to play.”