Xza Higgins

Let me take a deep breath. Traveling with a toddler is equal parts challenging and adorable. First of all, toddlers require their own set of everything. If you want to roll your luggage, the toddler wants to roll their own luggage too. If you are wearing a backpack, they want a backpack. If you want a Frappuccino, your toddler is going to want their own version of the "Baby Frappuccino" too. Whatever you thought you needed for baby, double it now that you have an opinionated toddler whose tastes change as quickly as their nap schedule. 

If your flight is leaving before 9am, I will not judge you for purchasing a bag of Frito's or that bag of Skittles to keep the peace. I don't know a single parent that hasn't used bribery to get their child to get from Point A to B, and Hudson News has everything your child could ever hope for when it comes to processed food bribery.

My nearly two year old protests almost everything that isn't her idea,

Nothing can prepare you for being a parent to a child with special needs. Our journey together didn't start off in the way many families do. For the first year we conducted a fairly "normal" life, you know, whatever that means. There was the first roll over, the first tooth, the first time he sat up and so on and so forth. I can remember meeting him for the first time and waiting for the moment our midwife or nurse would say something was wrong. I just stared at him with the intuition only a mother can have, and questioned why they weren't saying anything. No one did. No one said anything was wrong, and I breathed a sigh of relief, but the lingering thought there was something, wrong, or maybe I should say different, about my baby stayed in the back of my mind.

When we brought him home, he just wanted to be held. I turned to my online community and was reassured this was normal. I placed him in a sling and he immediately became calm. As he nursed, and nursed and nursed

Traveling with children can be a fairly daunting task, a friend once told me it could be compared to swimming in a pool of sand. You just don't get very far, very quickly. Just like so many other things in life change when you become a mom, so does the way you travel. Gone were the days of one carry on, you now have to pack spare outfits, bottles, toys and so much more. My son Atticus and I make a pretty nice travel duo. We have flown around the country together, and in under 2 years racked up 87,000 miles together. Not too shabby for a tot that up until recently did not know how to zip his sweater.  I'd love to say we have traveled to foreign lands, but MommyCon keeps us pretty busy domestically, and we have kept our travel to seventeen contiguous US states. When we travel I try to keep things concise and efficient. I learned long ago that some comforts of home should just be left behind, and in hopes of