What Earned Its Place in the Bag

There is a point in traveling with small children when packing stops being about preparing for everything that could possibly happen and starts becoming a record of everything that already has.

Our first trips with the twins involved a lot of stuff. Not necessarily because we used all of it, but because we didn't know yet what we wouldn't use. Every possibility seemed to require its own solution, and every solution seemed to require space in the car.

Now, at two, the calculation is different.

Every trip has essentially been an audition for the next one. Things we reach for come back. Things we carry around and never touch eventually stay home. Some things get replaced by smaller versions.

And one enormous Japanese floor bed continues to occupy an unreasonable percentage of our trunk because, unfortunately for the person trying to see through the rear-view mirror, it has earned its place.

The ridiculous thing we keep bringing

Our Zonli floor bed is huge.

Armon would very much like to find a smaller solution — not because he doesn't like what it does, but because he would also like to have a trunk and occasionally see through the rear-view mirror.

Linda is less interested in this argument.

The twins co-sleep, but having them sleep together in a regular hotel bed doesn't work for us because of the possibility of them falling off. Hotel rollaways don't solve the problem for us either: they're generally not the sleeping setup we want for both kids, and they can add another hotel expense.

So the floor bed comes.

Ours is made from organic cotton, its cover is machine washable, both kids fit on it, and most importantly, it gives them the same sleeping space everywhere we go.

That consistency has turned out to matter more to us than the trunk space.

A new hotel room can be completely unfamiliar — the sounds, the light, the furniture, the view — but when bedtime comes, their bed looks and feels like their bed.

At the Westin South Coast Plaza, we had enough floor space beside the king bed that we could set it up without rearranging the room. Linda even extended it with couch cushions that happened to be roughly the same height.

Someday, it may become a mattress in their own room.

For now, it is the giant thing we complain about while loading the car and are grateful we brought every single night.

Three outfits a day is not a typo

Linda packs roughly three outfits, per child, per day.

That sounds absurd until you spend a day with two two-year-olds.

There are meals. Water. Dirt. Swimming. Mystery substances.

And Amelia, who sometimes simply decides she would prefer another outfit.

The extra clothes aren't really about expecting catastrophe. They buy us the ability to not care very much when something happens.

A spilled lunch doesn't become, “Do we have enough clean clothes to make it through tomorrow?”

We change them and keep going.

Linda has also developed a less glamorous solution: Armon's old T-shirts.

At meals, one can go straight over the twins' clothes as a giant makeshift cover-up. The cute outfit survives lunch, an old T-shirt takes the damage, and nobody has to treat a toddler eating pasta like a bomb-disposal exercise.

There is, however, one person Linda does not extend this generous packing policy to: herself.

For a trip, she will pack the kids three outfits a day and then pack herself approximately two shirts, jeans and a dress.

The plan for her wardrobe is essentially to hope nobody spills anything on her.

They often do.

The toys mostly stopped coming

When the twins were younger, we packed toys for the hotel room because we assumed we needed to recreate some version of home once we got there.

Then we started noticing something.

They barely played with them.

By two, the hotel itself is interesting.

There are windows to look out of, hallways to explore, pools to watch, elevators to ride and entirely new places outside the room waiting for them.

Pismo Beach was the trip that made this particularly obvious. We had packed a bag of toys and realized we simply didn't need it.

Now the entertainment packing is intentionally small: a favorite stuffed animal, a ball and a couple of books.

Activity or sticker books still come with us, but those have a job. They live in the everyday bag and appear when the twins actually need to wait — at a restaurant before the food arrives, during check-in or somewhere else where two-year-old patience is being tested.

We stopped packing entertainment for imaginary downtime we rarely have.

The pool bag got smaller, too

We did the same thing with swimming.

There is no reason for us to devote half the car to pool equipment.

Small kickboards have been useful because the kids can hold onto them in the water and they take almost no room.

Cheap inflatable pool toys have also earned a peculiar place in our system precisely because we are not emotionally attached to them.

We can grab one at Target, use it for the trip and, if we don't want to bring it home, give it to another family at the pool.

Not everything needs to become permanent luggage.

That might actually be one of the biggest changes in how we pack.

Food has to earn refrigerator space

Toddler snacks used to feel like another logistical operation.

Now we try to bring more food that can travel easily: bananas, apples, beef jerky and other things the kids genuinely eat without requiring much refrigeration.

For foods that need to stay cool, we bring an insulated cooler bag and an ice pack.

If the hotel refrigerator has a freezer section, even a tiny one, we can refreeze the pack overnight and reset the system for the next day.

Milk still comes with us, although at two the twins drink much less of it than they did on earlier trips.

The goal is simple: hotel refrigerator space is limited.

We would rather not fill it with things that never needed to be in there in the first place.

Then there is the bag that never leaves us

The everyday bag is different from the luggage.

The luggage can go with the bell desk.

This cannot.

It stays with us because it contains the things that can turn a small toddler problem into a non-event.

We wrote more about exactly what stays in that bag — and how we handle the entire car-to-room transition — in “The Walk to the Room.”

The larger suitcases are packed for the trip.

The everyday bag is packed for the next twenty minutes.

And with toddlers, those are two very different things.

Some conveniences are worth paying for

One thing that technically takes up almost no room has absolutely earned its place: tipping cash.

We increasingly look at travel expenses in terms of time and friction rather than simply whether something costs extra.

If valet parking means we can each take a child while somebody else unloads the car, we use it.

If the bell desk can take everything upstairs while we check in with the twins, wonderful.

There was a time when we might have looked at those things as unnecessary expenses.

Now we sometimes look at them as buying back part of the trip.

We would rather spend money on the thing that eliminates twenty minutes of juggling luggage and toddlers if those twenty minutes can instead be spent actually enjoying where we came to be.

What finally stayed home

The funny thing is that it still feels like we packed too much every time we're standing beside a bell cart looking at all of it.

But there is a difference between a lot of stuff and too much stuff.

We still bring a lot.

What has changed is that we can explain why almost everything is there.

The big bag of toys didn't survive the audition.

Bulkier gear has gradually been replaced by smaller versions.

Pool things have gotten simpler.

Food has gotten easier.

The stroller got more compact.

And traveling at two feels remarkably easier than traveling at fourteen or eighteen months partly because the twins themselves require less equipment.

They are more interested in the place we're visiting than the things we brought from home.

That leaves us with a packing philosophy considerably less sophisticated than any beautifully organized checklist on the internet:

The thing we'd tell another parent

Traveling with toddlers isn't about packing well enough that everything goes according to plan.

It won't.

For us, it has become about bringing enough of the right things that when something doesn't go according to plan, we can redirect without the whole day falling apart.

That has probably been the biggest change between traveling with the twins at fourteen months and traveling with them at two.

At fourteen months, we packed for possibilities.

At two, we pack from experience.

Every trip teaches us what deserves to come on the next one.

And apparently the enormous floor bed remains undefeated.