Babies on Board: Why kids don’t mean the end of fun holidays

Maybe this sounds strange, but when I found out I was pregnant with my son, one of the first things I thought was, ‘I can’t wait to take him to Sicily.’ That wild, beautiful Italian island is my happy place, specifically a scrappy, bohemian city called Catania. As soon as the plane lands and I see ‘Mama Etna’, as the locals call the volcano, my shoulders drop. I am home. So of course I was excited to take my child there, and to see it as he would. But if I’m totally honest, I also worried he’d ruin it

You don’t need me to tell you that holidays change when you have children. I’d heard the viral social media quote “Travelling with kids isn’t a holiday; it’s just parenting without your stuff”. So I was worried

My Catania – the city I’d visited most years for over a decade – comes alive at night. Its vibrant after-dark scene even has its own name ‘Movida’, the period after 9.30pm when the streets, piazzas, restaurants and bars fill with people and life. In child-free years, my holidays there were spent lounging on the nearby beaches by day then heading out into the evening magic to utilise its plentiful alfresco trattorias, wine bars and open-air clubs. This, I understood, would change after children. The alternative of not going anymore wasn’t one I wanted to entertain, and so my husband and I determinedly booked our flights while I was heavily pregnant

Our first pilgrimage to Catania was in the diary for when our son would be six months old. I was glad to have made the decision during pregnancy rather than wait until after when I think post-partum nerves would have tricked me into thinking the trip would have been too hard. One thing I have learnt as a parent, especially when children are very small, is that you can’t make a decision based on how hard something is in that given moment because the status quo changes so radically in a matter of days or weeks

Often when we take that leap of faith and try something that feels daunting, the results embolden us. Things rarely go as badly as we think they do. My approach is still there’s a 50/50 chance of this going well, and that could be the case at home where I am not surrounded by sunshine and granita

One thing that I think helped was that we actually had last minute trip before the holiday we had booked to Sicily. It wasn’t planned, but my husband and I ended up doing a warm-up trip to Paris when Lenny was four months old. An amazing Eurostar deal for £50 return trip was too good to resist. Somehow a train felt less intimidating than a plane. The Eurostar imposes no baggage restrictions, and gave us more space. It was summer, which made things easier we spent our days strolling round the city, up and down the Seine, eating a steady stream of baked goods

Time to head to Sicily

That trip definitely gave me confidence. Then came our much anticipated holiday to Sicily which I so desperately wanted to go well. In my experience, the first thing that goes when taking kids on holiday is the ability to travel light. We left for our three-week trip with enough baggage for a family of six. Despite previously being someone who loves packing the night before, I began preparing a week in advance – filling my suitcase with bottles, dummies, nappies, the white noise machine, clothes, Calpol, a few bottles of formula and toys that he loved. I don’t pack quite as intensely now having finally accepted that unless you’re travelling to Outer Mongolia, you will be able to find baby-related goods anywhere you go. You definitely learn from your mistakes as a parent!

That first flight to Sicily was terrible. No sooner had we gone through customs and dropped our bags off, we were told our flight had been cancelled and there wouldn’t be another until tomorrow evening. To cut a long story short, we ended up dragging an exhausted baby round the M25 and stayed in a Travel Lodge, where the travel cot was essentially a sheet of cardboard surrounded by net (honestly, my experience of most travel cots)

We had carefully chosen afternoon flights in the hope our son might nap, and instead found ourselves on a 6am flight desperately trying to keep him quiet while the other passengers tried to sleep. It was, in short, a nightmare, but we arrived in Sicily in time for breakfast and coffee – and much in need of a holiday

The next few weeks came with highs and lows, but – at risk of sounding smug – mostly highs. Lenny loved Sicily; he loved the warmth, and the buzz. The Sicilians adore children, and he was treated like a mini celebrity wherever he went. He was welcomed everywhere; I asked at our favourite bar whether it was ok for us to bring him in the evening if he was well-behaved (in the UK most pubs require kids to leave at 7.30 latest, and restaurants not much later), and they looked at me blankly – as in many Southern European destinations, children aren’t siloed. They are integrated within the culture. They are not expected to be quiet (after all who could be louder than a Sicilian man with a bee in his bonnet?), but they are expected to behave. Lenny slept in his buggy late into the night affording us our evenings in relaxed restaurants and bars. We felt freer in Sicily than we did London

As Lenny grew older, his needs shifted – and how we travel has changed. He is now three and those heady days of sleeping in buggies are now over. He is happy to stay up later so long as it’s fun and outside – anything with live music has him captivated. He needs entertaining at dinner tables; while my husband and I enjoy long dinners and lunches, he does not. It is our job to make that fun for him, and so we bring reading books, sticker books and compact activity kits

Our family trip to Catania opened the place up to me in whole new way. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the late nights at wine bars, but there have been parts of the city that have unfolded in a way I wouldn’t have known were it not for being with a child – the ridiculously cheap, open-air tourist bus that took us along the coast to the neighbouring seaside towns, or the tiny toy train that encircles the city that we travelled on 392921 times last year. It has made me like the Sicilians more – their openness and inclusiveness towards him have made me feel so at ease as a mother of a small child

Since our first trip to Sicily, Lenny has made some impressive dents in passport stamps. We visited family in Switzerland, we have driven to Scotland and we even took him with us on our honeymoon to New Orleans

There have been things have worked and others that haven’t. We decided that hotels without balconies are probably a thing of the past for a while, after having to go to bed at 9pm every night on a trip to Rome. We almost exclusively stay in Airbnbs now because they give us space and a place to be if it rains. Our 10-hour flight to New Orleans was characterised by no less than 10 nappy changes due to an agonising, undiagnosed dairy intolerance. You don’t quite appreciate how small plane toilets are until you’re dealing with a writhing, screaming toddler with a painful nappy rash