T A B L E_T A L K Offer your tips to a Table Talker who plans to spend Easter in Paris with his son   How-to, why-not and what-for -- find it all at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     R E C E N T L Y Michelin madness By David Downie An exclusive club of upper-crust chefs waits patiently each year to see who is added to -- or booted out of -- the fold (03/11/99) The new North Vietnam By Jeff Greenwald A visit to Hanoi and environs reveals the complicated legacy of the war (03/10/99) Clash of the camels! By Laurie Udesky On Turkey's Aegean coast, wrestling beasts relieve winter's monotony (03/09/99) The wizard of Oise By David Downie Vincent van Gogh still draws painters and pilgrims to the Parisian suburb of Auvers-sur-Oise (03/07/99) Siberian wasteland By Jeffrey Tayler An overland journey exposes a traveler to the hazards of radiation, desolation and snowstorms (03/05/99) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		BY PHAEDRA HISE When we get a travel jones, my husband and I indulge. In our early married life, we dived the Cayman wall, danced at a German wedding, sampled rum and cigars in Cuba, raced our own small airplane across America. And then, we had a baby. I can hear you chuckling already. Most of my parenting friends did, too. They told me about what happens once you have kids -- you forget about Mount Everest and start sending away for the Disney brochures. "We like to stay home," they warned me. "Raising the kids is our top priority right now." What they really mean is that traveling with small children is just an exercise in expensive damage control, and who has the stomach for it? I did. I swore that this baby wasn't going to wean us off our little junkets. I swore some more when we actually went on some of those trips. My intentions were noble but I came to realize, for example, that even a well-behaved 2-year-old will run screaming through the Uffizi after 35 minutes of staring at Titians. Later, instead of saying, "Thank goodness, Mommy, you've finally found the only vacant hotel room in all of Venice and now we can finally get some sleep," this same 2-year-old will instead keep us all awake by screaming the A-B-C song well into the morning. If the aforementioned toddler is potty-training, she will always have to pee immediately after boarding a subway. As you can appreciate, I've made my share of mistakes. I've been that desperate parent next to you on the flight, you know, the one wrestling the screaming child? The one you mutter to yourself about, "Can't she just make that child STOP?" Yeah, I could, if I crammed a wad of the in-flight magazine into her mouth, but then the authorities would get a little too interested in my home life. Instead, I learned to outsmart the screaming child. I learned that it is possible to take a vacation with small children, one that adults also enjoy, and I'm not talking Disney. I'm going to share my secrets with you, in hopes that more of us can take child-included vacations, thereby preserving our happiness and making us less likely to resent the little buggers and ruin their lives with constant refrains of "I always wanted to see the Acropolis. And then I had YOU." First, there's no way around this one but it's easier if you just have one kid. I'm not saying to limit yourself to one or you'll never travel again. I'm just saying that you can take more adult-oriented vacations with only one child. See, you're still working a properly weighted ratio: One adult can check out the Pietà while the other feeds Cheerios to the cranky toddler. With two kids, things get much tougher. As my sister with two sons in diapers says, "Traveling is awful. The routine with the kids is just like at home, but without all the useful equipment." With three kids, you're just not going to have an insanity-free trip. As my other sister said after delivering her third boy, "We've moved from a man-to-man into a zone defense." If you can manage to take three children on a vacation without once longing to drive roofing nails into your forehead, you need to book yourself on Oprah right now and share your secret with the rest of the planet. N E X T+P A G E | Work with what you have