Why You Need to Spend Baby’s First Birthday Abroad

Why opt for the traditional first birthday at home when you can take your baby on a memorable trip abroad?

If that idea scares you, fear not. First of all, every trip you take has its own challenges and stresses. Make peace with that and your baby’s first (and so on) birthday trip abroad is completely doable.

Babies won’t remember the trip but memories from photographs and stories we tell will live on forever. To tell you the truth, the major part of this trip was for us to get away. We hadn’t been able to travel abroad for two years. Those two years were filled with major life events such as getting pregnant, moving across the US from Southern California to our beautiful Tampa, and birthing and raising our beautiful healthy baby girl. Being that we are avid travelers, the travel itch had us bad this time around.

The thing with first birthdays is that babies don’t remember it, so why stress with planning a whole birthday when you can take a trip as a family? That way you won’t have to entertain x-amount of people, ordering or baking a birthday cake, let alone the smash cake, prepping all the food and snacks, favors, decorations, etc. To me, that’s more stress than planning a long trip abroad.

With our baby’s first birthday approaching, we planned a month-long trip to Europe; visiting Denmark, U.K., Switzerland, Italy, and Sweden. Prior to the long haul flight, we had taken our daughter back to California twice, once at two months and the other at 10 months, so she was used to long flights. She was amazing in all three of those trips. As long as she was nursing, napping, being entertained, and making new friends on the plane, she was perfectly fine. This girl was made to travel! I can’t recall all the times passengers, flight attendants, even pilots would come up to us after the flight saying how amazing she did- major win as new parents!

We are that “non-traditional” young family that gets on a plane en route to a new place on major holidays or events or volunteering at homeless shelters instead of stuffing our faces with holiday food. There is so much more out there in the world than your familiar surroundings. So why stop there once you have kids? Kids should be more of a motivation to explore the world through their eyes. Let me tell you, that is priceless! So why not be adventurous and order plane tickets instead of cake for a change?