Expectations vs reality

What could be reasonably expected from a 3 year-old during a two-week European vacation?

Bringing kids on trips seem fairly standard nowadays. Everyone around us is doing it, and even though we've done our fair share of traveling with LP starting when he was just 4 months old, we sometimes feel we're a little too cautious or too tame in doing this, being surrounded by people who go trekking for a month in Australia/South Africa/Patagonia with an infant, bring the kids to Japan for Christmas, you know what I mean. We always loved traveling and knew we wanted to bring our kids along -this is not a reproach to my parents who traveled quite a lot but never with us (with the exception of one time in Florida when I was five, and they had brought a nanny) because I know times were different and they had their reasons, but this is something that I truly wish had been different from my childhood.

The general assumption seems to be that you can take kids anywhere, and they will adjust to about any kind of conditions, providing they are reasonably safe. When we planned our trip, we pretty much thought about what we wanted to do and to see -the mountains for M, art and city browsing/shopping for me, etc. Italy is not Disney World; while it is quite kid-friendly in a way, it's just not in others, and there were days when LP was reeeally bored. He didn't care about the medieval sights or the wineries -for him, fun is playing in the park, or running in the grass, or seeing cars and machinery. When you ask him what he preferred, his anwser is very typically three-year-old-boy-ish: being at the airport, flying on the plane, taking the train, boating on the Mediterranean, taking the funicular up the Alps, AND especially visiting the Ferrari factory. Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of the Sistine chapel or the Coliseum in there.

Still, he did pretty well for the first part of the trip, the first ten days or so. He seemed to adapt to the absence of routine and change of schedule well, and there were only a few minor meltdowns -normal.

Then something happened: LP disappeared and was mostly replaced by a demon-child I really didn't like. There were a few days in Florence and Rome that were simply a disaster from morning to night: off-the-charts tantrums (I mean their intensity surprised even ourselves) to a scale we had never seen and where he was completely hysterical and out-of-control. We've talking craaaaazy screaming, kicking, punching my belly, being really aggressive and angry, displaying behaviors we had never seen him do before, like yelling at us to shut up, or the time he threw a small rock at me with all the strength in his little arms, narrowly missing my eye. After we were able to calm him down, there was a lot of explaining and reasoning and negotiation and sobbing and him feeling extremely sorry and shameful and telling us he would do better from now on... Until the whole circus started again an hour later. Really, walking all day in brutal heat was tough on all of us, especially for this pregnant chick, and we were at the end of our tether. Even while he's always been an intense and at times quite challenging child, never for a minute I had wanted to just turn my back and leave him somewhere before. But right then, I admit that sometimes for a second I really wanted to, for him to just not be my problem anymore.

In hindsight, there were a few things we could have done differently: not moving around so much, for instance, and rather settle in one or two bases. Two weeks was perhaps a bit long too, and 10 days may have been ideal. He didn't have much time or many places to blow some steam, and he went to bed late (even for our standards), usually around 10:00 or even 10:30 (we didn't have much control over this: dinners in restaurants were usually very long, and they're simply not open at 6 or so... Even when we showed up around 7:30, we were often the first patrons there).

And I mean, on top of all of this, he had every possible excuse in the book: the heat was sweltering, the days were long, and going from hotel to hotel, from restaurant to restaurant, always be looking for the next public restroom, and living off your suitcase can get hard on everyone. He's just 3! And has always thrived on his routine.

But then, there were other kids there, and they weren't acting out like this. We did see a few tantrumy-crying kids (let's not kid ourselves, vacations can be stressful to them), but never on that level, and in fact most were just being patient and nice and well-behaved. I know this partly has to do with temperament: even on a good day LP is very active and unwilling to stay into place for long, and so waiting for hours in his stroller during a guided tour was never going to happen, we were well aware of that. But this has left us exhausted and quite discouraged. And a bit lost. We do realize that some parents are simply handed easier kids than others, and that there's nothing you can do about that. But what are we supposed to do when this happens? Seeing him so unlike himself and so crazy, I couldn't help thinking where have we gone so wrong for him to behave this way? We were thinking that whatever we were doing wasn't helping much, and we were just so afraid that we had been turning him into a monster.

We've not been handling this really well. We had a hard time keeping our cool and not losing our patience, and we just weren't sure how to navigate through this. How can you make him feel that it's OK to be tired and bored and fed up, but that some gestures or attitudes or behaviors are simply unacceptable? And what are you supposed to do when you firmly say so, and give him very clear boundaries, but he just totally laughs them off and defiantly goes on? We never really had to face this, and it just doesn't come really naturally to us. Sadly, we both feel it's probably one of the most important things we just have to get right.