I am big on encouraging my son to want to travel. First, there is the selfish reason – I want him to be keen to come on all the trips I have planned while he’s still young enough to need to come with us. And the unselfish one, of course, is that travelling to different places can teach him SO much.
If he could go anywhere tomorrow, apparently, it would be Egypt. And the reason is a bit, well, strange. It all started when we had a great story book from the library, called What Can a Crane Pick Up? It starts off with the crane picking up the kind of stuff you’d expect, but then much to the amusement of my curious three-year-old, the crane picks up a dead mummy (with pyramids in the background).
One of the more famous tombs I visited in Egypt … |
Since then, “dead mummies” have come up in conversation and games all the time. After much persistence (it was bedtime and I didn’t want him to have nightmares, but he won) I explained the process, pulled out a book I had about ancient Egypt, and looked up pictures from my Egyptian trip. The next time we visited my mother, she found her old photo album from her trip to Egypt and showed him the tombs and pyramids she’d seen – he wasn’t very impressed, though, that she hadn’t had the foresight to take multiple photos of mummies for him.
Then, of course, he wanted to make his own mummies, and he persuaded me to give him a bandage from our first aid kit. He wrapped up Lego men and made his own Egyptian museum. He even buried one in the garden to dig up again, after I’d had to explain how they were found by archaeologists.
Egyptian mummies, three-year-old style |
And now, unsurprisingly, he really wants to go to Egypt. Yippee! While this whole mummies topic has had him asking way more questions about death and dying than I really want to answer with a three-year-old, the flip side is that his enthusiasm for travel, always pretty high, is sky-rocketing. It might be a few more years before I get him to Egypt, but even the idea of going, looking places up on the map, reading books about them and playing travel games is all fun, and is surely instilling my little man with a particularly heightened love of travel – fingers crossed!
With thanks to Travel Associates and their Egyptian holidays.
Rae Hilhorst says
You’ve started something now, if anything goes missing be assured it will be wrapped up somewhere. xxx Rae
Amanda Kendle says
Oh dear I hadn’t thought about that Rae! So far, so good, but you’re right, the potential is there …
Andrea says
That’s brilliant! I’m hoping to instill the same love in my son.
Amanda Kendle says
I think it’s definitely something you can strongly influence!!
Jo at ZigaZag blog says
I think it’s great that you’ve instilled an eager mind and a tentative love of travel in your son. What better way to learn about yourself and the world … than to make sock mummy’s in a drawer! Only joking! I think you’re going to have lots of happy trips in the future, experiencing the weird, the wonderful and the wacky. Enjoy 🙂
Amanda Kendle says
Oh indeed. The weird, the wonderful, the wacky, and the rubbish bins 😉