My sister in law and her wife want to celebrate their daughter’s 2nd birthday in Sicily next Spring. My father in law and his girlfriend are going. They want me, my husband and son to come, too.
I don’t not want to go, but I’m not sure I want to go either, and I think my husband is also on the fence.
Our concerns include the following:
My son (five years old, autistic) has a feeding disorder and will only eat certain things - mostly dry food. The idea of taking him to a foreign country where he doesn’t know the food is scary. I presume we’d have to pack another suitcase with his food in it, but I’m not even sure how that works with customs. What if they lost the suitcase? What would we feed him?
We didn’t budget for a vacation in 2026. We rarely go on vacation. We could come up with the money but I’m concerned we’re not putting enough into retirement as it is. His Dad is willing to pay for lodging. That puts us on the hook for plane tickets and everything else.
I’m nervous about crossing the border given our current political situation in the US. FIL’s girlfriend is a newly minted citizen and I’m worried about that most of all. Although she travels to her home country all the time, so maybe I’m being paranoid. I just don’t know how this situation may deteriorate over the next year. We could all be living in a police state.
I don’t feel a particular desire to travel. I had a hard enough time getting excited about Florida earlier this year, but it turned into a really nice trip. So maybe I’m just being pessimistic when it would turn out great.
My husband and I are very close to his sister, and my husband also has a lot of resentments toward his father, so I think it’s a mixed bag for him. They are both begging us to come, and his Dad has asked us what requirements would make it a yes.
Do you think I’m overstating the hassle? Or not thinking about something? I haven’t left the country since 2007.
Right off the bat, this is kinda ridiculous. No two year old is going to appreciate that, and I suspect it’s just an excuse for them to take the vacation they wanted to take anyways.
If they really did want the whole family there to celebrate a birthday, requiring them to pony up the costs of major travel across the world is nonsensical.
I think you’ve got a right to feel how you want about travel. In some ways international travel is no big deal, but in other ways it’s huge and overwhelming.
As an outside observer to your OP who doesn’t remember all the details about your son that you might have shared on the boards, the concern about his food needs sounds very legitimate. If the food issue is strict and can’t be slightly bent for a week on vacation, it’ll be a huge lift to ensure he’s got the food he needs, particularly in a country where you don’t speak the language fluently. Maybe there are some resources/research you could do in advance around that specifically, but it seems overwhelming to me. Would you need to bring your own food into restaurants (and communicate to those restaurants what you are doing and why)?
Budget? That’s something only you can decide. Knowing that you have some not unsubstantial financial resources in your extended family for long term support, and with that extended family offering to subsidize this trip… maybe the money is less of an actual impediment than an emotional impediment? How do you engage with unplanned luxury/extra expenses in your life in general? Does it give you anxiety?
Crossing the border… I don’t know. People continue to do so. I think even if the US were in much worse shape than we are in now, international travel would still be fine for most (white, cisgender, heterosexual, and favored racial profile of the moment) people.
Also, “we’re celebrating your niece’s 2nd birthday… in Sicily! And we want you to come” is both an invitation and also an imposition. Travel is expensive and disruptive, and it takes a certain kind of wealth and attitude to treat it like it’s just a casual thing. I know that I would feel a little bit of pressure, like my family expected me to spend the $1000s of dollars for the occasion of a 2nd birthday, and it might make it harder for me to enjoy than if I was planning my own vacation on my own schedule.
Traveling a long distance, especially internationally, is too big and too expensive a thing to do if your heart isn’t truly in it of your own free will. Don’t hesitate to decline.
This would be a firm “no thank you” for me. In order for everyone to enjoy this, everyone needs to be 100% in. Nothing ruins a vacation faster than having someone there that doesn’t really want to be there, and if you are that person, then it makes it doubly worse, considering the cost and hassle for you (and your family). When the niece is 12 then maybe it’s something to consider because you can share experiences with her, but for a 2-year old this seems more like a stealth-brag for the adults. Pass.
It’s worth noting that my husband’s father travels constantly, and is outside the country more often than in it. This is part of the resentment. When I got pregnant, he told us he wanted to help us out with childcare a couple days a week, and insisted he wanted to do it, but when COVID hit, he decided he wanted to travel more than he wanted to see our son, and he left us without childcare with no notice whatsoever in the middle of a child care crisis. My husband had just started his own practice, so we lost somewhere around $50,000 that year because Dad wanted to travel. At the height of the pandemic.
He’s a pleasant person to be around and can be very generous, but he is also very narcissistic.
Anyway, we stayed with him in Florida with no incident, so it’s not like the trip would be unpleasant. But travel is no big deal for this guy. And I’m guessing if we asked him to pay for it all, he would.
There was nothing entitled about SIL’s request. It was literally, “Hey we’re going to Sicily, want to come too?” Of course her Dad would come because he travels most of the time, so that was no imposition on him. They’ve traveled together before.
We’re the odd ones out. But yes they are now both pressuring us to come. But only after we said we might.
Yeah, to me this might be worth worrying about. Not just the food (that seems doable, maybe you could pack one carryon that was just food or something) but also traveling with an autistic kid in general, although it sounds like you went to Florida and had a good time, so maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal.
I guess the money thing comes down to whether you and your husband would enjoy the trip and would enjoy experiencing Sicily with his family (particularly, it sounds like, his sister) to where it would be worth it for you. And if not, whether you could negotiate them to pay for more of it to where it would be worth it. (But also see 1.) Be aware that your kid will probably not remember much of it five years from now, but he may well remember some of it, you will remember it, and you’ll have pictures. We haven’t done international travel with our kids but we’ve taken a few vacation trips with them, all of which I fondly remember.
I think this is the least worrisome of the three. If it bothers you get refundable tickets and then you can get a refund if the situation deteriorates enough. If the US is in such a state that you can’t get a refund, then I think you’ve got enough other problems that this would be the least of what you would have to worry about. FIL’s girlfriend is her own problem, and maybe his, but not yours.
My extended family went to Italy last year for a family reunion and we didn’t go, partially because one of our kids was going to be at camp (and I didn’t feel comfortable leaving the country with her at camp, although as she gets older I think I’d be more okay with it) and partially because we wanted to encourage my dad, who has mild dementia, NOT to go (which he ended up not doing). But if it hadn’t been for those two things, we probably would have (though my kid doesn’t have issues with either food or travel). But yeah, there’s an example of how we had issues that weren’t your issues, but where we ended up not doing the international travel… My sister’s family also didn’t go, partially again because of our dad but partially because they couldn’t swing the cost. (If my parents had been able to go, they probably would have helped out, but they felt weird asking given that we really didn’t want my dad to go.) The rest of my extended family went and apparently had an awesome time.
ETA: I’m also the kind of person who haaaaates thinking about planning vacations, and only thinks about the obnoxious and annoying parts about travel beforehand, and then… the actual trip is kind of great. So I really get that, and don’t let that affect you too much!
You didn’t really mention anything about this in your original post, so I don’t know if you’re aware of this and it’s not a problem, or if you’re not aware of it and hadn’t considered it, so I’m going to mention it:
Sicily’s airports are not directly served from any American airport. I’m not sure where you’re coming from, so I don’t know if your best bet is to transfer through London or Amsterdam, but if you’re coming from the US, you will need a transfer to get to Sicily. That means a longer flight experience with airport downtime in the middle.
Your view might be different, but I wouldn’t want to do that with a five-year-old. And I’ve traveled a lot with my kids (they ticked off their twenty-seventh country a few weeks ago). At that age, we were pretty careful about the burden we were putting on them. They’re now older and can handle a lot more (they just did an unaccompanied 7-hour train trip to a summer camp in Provence), but back then, we wouldn’t ask this of them.
The whole situation is already bizarre, but I’d be comfortable saying No on the above grounds alone.
Edit to add: I just did a search to confirm, and my information is out of date. There are a handful of direct US-to-Sicily flights that have recently become available, e.g. out of Newark. But in general it’s still going to be a tough haul.
IMO/IME:
You would not want this trip to be the kid’s first airplane ride. You would not want this trip to be the kid’s first extended visit anywhere away from home. You would want all the expenses of the rehearsal trips, plural, and the actual Sicily trip itself, to be fully end-to-end paid for by FIL. You cannot count on being able to bring food for the kid from the USA; you’ll need to have arranged local sources. Etc.
You’ve pointed out before about how your / husband’s extended family is oblivious about anyone but themselves. They have no idea how much harder this is for you and kidlet than it is for them. And they cannot be educated on that point because they are willfully blind to it.
Two different cow-orkers held a grudge because my wife and I declined their destination weddings (Hawaii, Aruba) because work was extremely busy, time was extremely short, and a 3-4 day weekend in some exotic locale holds no appeal to me whatsoever.
And that’s without the kind of unique complexities in your situation.
This would be his second time, FWIW. He did a round trip flight earlier this year - less than three hours each way. We stayed for a week in Florida and other than extreme hyperactivity the first couple of days, he did pretty well.
I’ll have to think about this. From his perspective.
Oh yeah, I meant to comment on this as well. When we traveled with the kids at this age, we were also conscious of minimizing major time-zone changes. Kids do poorly with jet lag; you can count on at least two and probably three days at the top where the kid is cranky and difficult because you’re suddenly displaced by eight or nine hours. An adult can power through it, but a kid shuts down mid-afternoon (and then wakes up at 2am). Not fun. If you’re there for a week, you don’t even really get to start enjoying your time until you’re halfway done.
I have no idea about #1, or about the challenges of traveling with a kid in general, but #3 is almost certainly a non-issue (and you would know well ahead of time if it were to become an issue). Hundreds of thousands of people travel to and from the US every day, and the vast majority of them have no issues. The rest of you are native-born US citizens, and your FIL’s girlfriend would be going no matter what, correct?
As for #2 – well, my first reaction was “dude, you rarely go on vacation and now you have a chance to take a subsidized trip to Italy, why the heck is this a concern and not an additional reason TO go?” Obviously, I don’t know the specifics of your personal finances, but if the main issue is “we might not be putting enough into retirement” rather than “we have to go into debt for this,” I’d say go.
On the flip side, “I don’t want to” is always a perfectly fine and valid reason not to do something, and it sounds like maybe you just don’t.
I was badgered into a vacation with my first wife. She suddenly decided that she wanted to go home for Christmas. We lived in Idaho at the time and home for her was MN. Not that big a deal, normally, but it was last minute. Luckily we had no kids yet. The day we left, and unknown to us (no internet in 1973), we were driving into a monster snow storm in northern Idaho. It was a whiteout all the way over Lookout Pass, which was a two lane road then, and sheer ice down the other side. Sub-freezing weather all the way across the upper tier, with me having to periodically stop the car to chip ice off the headlights and the radio antenna. We dragged in to northern MN and all I could think of was the horrible drive going back, which turned out to be not quite as miserable, but not good. Gale force winds in Montana that closed the highway and forced us to stop at a motel for an extra night. I was not a happy person.
You’ve raised enough issues that I think the best move would be to say, “Thanks but no thanks” - and sooner rather than later. With your limited travel budget and concerns w/ your son, have you been dying to go to Sicily? At this time? With these people? Because even with Dad paying for lodging, you’ll be spending a big chunk of your upcoming travel budget in terms of $, time, vacation, child-related stress. Just because it will not be quite as pricey as it would otherwise be to go to Sicily, doesn’t mean it is your best option.
Do you like traveling with other people? THESE other people? Will they be supportive of your childcare needs while traveling?
Don’t let them push you into doing something you know isn’t what you really want to do.
And, gotta pile on - the idea of a trip to Italy for a 2d birthday is silly enough to skew me against it.
Does it change anyone’s mind about the silliness to know my husband’s family is all Sicilian heritage? Don’t think we know many people over there, though.
Oh, yeah, and also I remember when traveling with my older one when she was younger, she was actually really well-behaved for a few days because she absolutely loved the new things and the new experiences (we only had three hours of jet lag at most), and then if the trip was longer than 3-4 days, the lack of sleep would catch up with her and she would start melting down more.
We did get badgered into going to Hawaii (another extended family thing, my parents did go to this one which was a few years back before my dad had symptoms) and that was fun, and my mom got to hang out with our younger one.