{"id":38158,"date":"2025-11-09T06:12:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-09T06:12:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/we-traveled-to-europe-with-our-11-month-old-baby-i-wish-wed-avoided-these-3-mistakes-on-our-international-trip\/"},"modified":"2025-11-09T06:12:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-09T06:12:06","slug":"we-traveled-to-europe-with-our-11-month-old-baby-i-wish-wed-avoided-these-3-mistakes-on-our-international-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/we-traveled-to-europe-with-our-11-month-old-baby-i-wish-wed-avoided-these-3-mistakes-on-our-international-trip\/","title":{"rendered":"We traveled to Europe with our 11-month-old baby. I wish we&#8217;d avoided these 3 mistakes on our international trip."},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6900dc97c007ca8c2737c362?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Author Haley Johnson with her husband, baby\"\/><figcaption>My husband and I went on a European trip with our baby. It wasn&#039;t perfect, but I&#039;m glad we did it. <\/p>\n<p>Haley Johnson<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>My husband and I took our baby on a trip to Europe, visiting London and Paris.<\/li>\n<li>I wish we&#039;d planned the itinerary around the baby a bit more and hadn&#039;t tried to do so much.<\/li>\n<li>The chaos sometimes outweighed the fun, but I don&#039;t regret taking our 11-month-old on this trip.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>When you&#039;re presented with two choices \u2014 1. take your baby on a once-in-a-lifetime trip through Europe or 2. stay home and watch &quot;Bluey&quot; reruns \u2014 you obviously choose the former.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, I&#039;ve traveled out of the country several times \u2026 but doing it with a baby? That&#039;s an entirely different ballgame. <\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, my husband and I decided it was a worthwhile trip (although if you had asked us mid-meltdown on the streets of Paris, we might have answered differently). <\/p>\n<p>Here are the three big mistakes that made our trip to London and Paris harder than it needed to be.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Not planning the trip around the baby<\/strong><\/h2>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6900dc690be9845f2dc53b02?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Author Haley Johnson with husband and stroller in front of eiffel tower\"\/><figcaption>In many ways, our baby called a lot of the shots. <\/p>\n<p>Haley Johnson<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>When someone else plans your trip \u2014 a person without kids \u2014 do yourself a favor and double-check that itinerary. <\/p>\n<p>I foolishly thought our baby would nap on the go, and that we could sneak out of dinners early to keep bedtime somewhat on track. Cute theory. Didn&#039;t happen.<\/p>\n<p>Case in point: we had tickets to see &quot;Les Mis\u00e9rables&quot; in London. Amazing idea \u2014 unless you&#039;re traveling with an infant. <\/p>\n<p>Obviously, you can&#039;t stroll into the theater with a baby, and we didn&#039;t exactly have a babysitter on call in a foreign country, so the tickets went to waste. <\/p>\n<p>That wasn&#039;t the only thing we missed. We had plenty of prepaid activities that went unused simply because we desperately needed a quiet, dark space where our baby could nap.<\/p>\n<p>Looking back, I also wish we had sought out more parks and baby-friendly stops. Instead, we found ourselves constantly battling cobblestone streets and narrow sidewalks with a stroller that suddenly felt like a ball and chain. <\/p>\n<p>Paris was the hardest \u2014 no high chairs at restaurants we visited, endless stairs, and streets that felt like an obstacle course. Next time, I wouldn&#039;t even bother with a stroller. I&#039;d just strap on the carrier and call it a day.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Trying to keep a routine<\/strong><\/h2>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6900dca7c007ca8c2737c369?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Author Haley Johnson with husband, baby in front of castle\"\/><figcaption>Our baby didn&#039;t stick to a routine in Europe. <\/p>\n<p>Haley Johnson<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>At home, my baby has a strict nap and bedtime schedule. He thrives on his routine, so I assumed we could simply take it with us. <\/p>\n<p>Reality check: Babies don&#039;t care about your color-coded calendar when they&#039;re jet-lagged in another time zone.<\/p>\n<p>The turning point was when I finally let go of the idea of structure. Instead of watching the clock, we followed his lead. <\/p>\n<p>If he fell asleep in the carrier at 3 p.m., great. If he stayed up way past his bedtime because we were at dinner, we just rolled with it. Once I stopped trying to control everything, the whole trip felt lighter.<\/p>\n<p>Basically, the sooner I accepted that European travel with a baby is more about survival than schedules, the better time we all had.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Attempting to do too much<\/strong><\/h2>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6900dc56c007ca8c2737c34d?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Author Haley Johnson pushing strolling on cobblestone\"\/><figcaption>We should&#039;ve planned a bit more time for rest. <\/p>\n<p>Haley Johnson<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Our itinerary looked amazing on paper: dinner reservations, walking tours, museums, and day trips. <\/p>\n<p>The problem? It wasn&#039;t made for a family traveling with a baby. By day two, it felt like we were trying to run a marathon.<\/p>\n<p>Babies don&#039;t care that you&#039;ve booked a 2 p.m. tour of the Louvre or that you&#039;ve got nonrefundable tickets for a river cruise. They care about eating when they&#039;re hungry, sleeping when they&#039;re tired, and letting everyone know when they&#039;ve had enough. <\/p>\n<p>And once our baby hit his wall, it didn&#039;t matter if we were standing in front of the Mona Lisa \u2026 the day was over.<\/p>\n<p>What I wish we&#039;d done is pick just a few things we really wanted to do and build the rest of the schedule around naps, snacks, and downtime. <\/p>\n<p>You can&#039;t do everything with a baby in tow, but you can still have an amazing time if you stop trying to cram it all in.<\/p>\n<h2>Even so, I don&#039;t regret taking the trip <\/h2>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6900dc4c0be9845f2dc53af5?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Baby being held in air\"\/><figcaption>I&#039;m grateful for the memories we made as a family. <\/p>\n<p>Haley Johnson<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>You could argue the chaos outweighed the fun \u2026 and sure, there were plenty of meltdowns (some his, some mine). But honestly, I wouldn&#039;t trade it. <\/p>\n<p>I&#039;ll never get another chance to see Europe with my baby at that tiny age, even if it meant lugging a stroller up too many staircases and missing half the things we booked. <\/p>\n<p>The alternative would&#039;ve been staying home. If my choice is between doing nothing in my living room or eating croissants on a Paris sidewalk while bouncing a baby on my hip \u2026 I&#039;ll take the latter every time.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My husband and I went on a European trip with our baby. It wasn&#039;t perfect, but I&#039;m glad we did it. Haley Johnson My husband and I took our baby on a trip to Europe, visiting London and Paris. I wish we&#039;d planned the itinerary around the baby a bit more and hadn&#039;t tried to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38159,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-38158","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}