5 . Travelling with kids is 90 percent reminding yourself to live in the moment and 10 percent making up your mind to never again leave your house.

I have an uncanny ability to forget this as soon as we return home from a trip and I’ve finished washing piles of dirty clothes in our luggage and cleaning all the mess caused by the kids. Extremely tired and annoyed, I would actually begin to miss the place we just left!

Family travel is like childbirth, I suppose. Painful, loud, messy, sort of awful, actually, but also wonderful. And you remember only the wonderful—until you’re back on a plane and your kids are fighting over who gets the aisle（通道）seat. Then you remember the bad stuff.

Last weekend, my kids and I flew to Texas for a trip we would have nothing to complain about—big hotel, wonderful view.

And yet—we found things to complain about（抱怨）. The pool was bigger in that other hotel! Why do you get to shower first? They call this coffee? Luckily, I’ve learned to put my metaphorical coat of armor（隐喻盔甲外衣）on as soon as we land somewhere, and it forces complaints to bounce off me and land in a pile at my feet.

For three days, genuine fun was had and annoying complaints were heard and ignored, until it was time to catch a plane and fly home.

Unfortunately, our flight was canceled. We spent hours finding a hotel room. We hit the hotel pool before bed and swam well into the night, my kids making up songs and laughing so hard at their silly lyrics and their crazy good fortune to be swimming at 10: 30 on a school night.

And that was when it hit me that family travel is all those things I said before but it’s also a lot more. It’s taking your kids to parts of the world that will open their eyes and finding that actually, yours need opening too. It’s remembering that joy and memories are where you make them, not where you find them.