To travel or not to travel (like crazies)

"Que LOQUITOS!" (pronounced: Low-KEE-toes and not Low-Kwee-toes) This, or some variation, is what we hear when we share our TRAVEL plans with family or friends. In Spanish, it means, "You little crazies!" It's a nice way of telling us we're brave, stupid, lucky or irresponsible for traveling the way we do: frequently, boldly and with two little ones. Whether it's a weekend getaway or a month-long stint in Ecuador, we like to go and go often.

The toughest consideration are the kids. Is this good for them? Or are we just fulfilling some egocentric void by doing this? We don't want to be those A-list, A-hole celebrities who give their kids awful names just to make themselves sound cool, like Jason Lee, for example. Pilot Inspektor? Really? I'm sure your kid will have a great time with that one in school. Anyway, we've done some research on this whole traveling with kids deal, but ultimately - like most things in the illogical, unscientific art of parenting - it's a judgment call. It has its pros, and other pros, and some cons.

Apart from giving our kids their rightful inheritance of being trilingual (English, Spanish and Turkish), we also want them to be citizens of the world. Hokey as it may sound, we figure, the more they can interact and experience different people, different cultures and different places, the more prepared they'll be for the ever-shrinking world that awaits them. In some way, it's also a mitigation strategy for those teenage years when they're supposed to hate us. "See all the awesome places we took you!" we'll surely tell 'em. That should help, right? Hopefully, we're right about some of this.