This week finds me on the road again for business. (San Diego, as luck would have it.) I travel a good amount in my current job – often enough to enjoy it without getting burned out or seriously messing up my home life. But going out of town on business, even for 48 hours can make my daughters pretty anxious. Travel disrupts the byzantine routine of dinner and bath and bedtime reading and such that they’ve all become used to. Frankly, they just don’t like that. Neither do I - though my disappointment is tempered by the promise of kid free time.
One way I found to redirect the anxiety about my business trips was to promise to bring them a memento from the road when I did any travel involving airplanes. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Acquisitive little creatures that they are, their thoughts upon learning that I’ll be going out of town immediately turn to the swag — to the point that when I called my wife to say that I had landed in San Diego, my baby girl got on the phone to ask me what I’d bought her. On my end, however, carving out 45 minutes to do a souvenir hunt on a business trip can be daunting, especially on short trips like this one.
Some trips gave me free time for some creative shopping — trips to Chinatown in San Francisco for mini kites, or Matruska dolls from a trip to Moscow. Some were so compacted that I was left to sprint for a t-shirt stand on the way to my gate at the airport.
After much trial and error, the girls and I have settled on a happy compromise: snow globes. You know the kind I’m talking about — water-filled souvenir globes from various cities with little vignettes. They come in all shapes and sizes– there must be 10 different varieties of New York City snow globes with different skylines and assortments of cabs and pedestrians. San Francisco has a great Haight and Ashbury snow globe with a peace sign and two stoned looking hippies in tie dyes standing on the famous street corner. Snow globes are small, affordable and ubiquitous. They’re used, indiscriminantly, to depict even the hottest most forbidding locales as if they were a quaint, wintry New England countryside. I’ve never been to Death Valley California, but I’m guessing there’s a snow globe in the shop there memorializing it for passersby. My girls love them, too — they take them down off the shelf and line them up, shake them up to watch the “snow” fall and use them as the framework for elaborate games of make believe.
Depending on when I get home, I’ll leave them out on the kitchen tables for the girls to open when they get up. In other scenarios, I’m mobbed before I can even set foot in the door — hugs followed by the inevitable question “did you remember to get us anything?” It’s a lot of pressure. So if you see me scurrying about downtown San Diego tomorrow afternoon, just point me to the nearest snow globe dispensary and I’ll be on my way. I’m just holding up my end of the bargain, here!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Don Martelli, Every Other Thursday. Every Other Thursday said: Business travel and figuring out what to get the kids. New Every Other Thursday post by @paulfroberts http://ow.ly/uxyx #EoTBlog #dads [...]
Have you had any problem with security? It seems like the liquid in the snow globe would be an issue for some of the more obstinate TSA agents.
I pretty much gave up on gifts for the kids once they started “meh”ing everything. I think the last time they got gifts was winter hats (functional) from Minnesota with the Wild logo on ‘em. At least they still use those, the other stuff has been donated, stuffed into the back of their closet or buried in a toy box somewhere.