Losing Your Kids on Vacation

Vacation with your kids can be a lot of fun. Then again, it can bring stress. Like when they have to go to the bathroom for the fifteenth time between breakfast and lunch. I guess that's why they sell Pull-Ups in larger sizes. But there's not much that's more stressful about motherhood than losing your child, especially when you are on vacation. That's what happened to me when we took a vacation with my nine-month-old to the Vatican.

Taking an infant to the Vatican has a few perks. If you have a child in a stroller, they let you bypass some of the lines, allowing you to take the elevator instead of the stairs like everyone else. Whether it was the Vatican Museum or the Sistine Chapel, the ushers would see my child in the stroller, pull us aside, and allow us to take a shortcut. I thought we were getting a pretty cool deal. Until we got to St Peter's Basilica.

On this particular day, the Pope was in town. I had been there once before, but when the Pope is in town everything is extremely crowded. There was a big line of people waiting to get in. When we got close to the front of the line, one of the workers grabbed my husband and took him to the side, saying something in Italian. We had already seen this several times on this trip; the ushers would whisk us away to take the elevator because we had the stroller. This time, only my husband and daughter were allowed to go. I was with my parents and in-laws, and we had to stay in line.

We waited in line until we got to the elevator. We thought we'd meet my husband and daughter there, but we could not find them. Perhaps there was a line to use the elevator too, we figured. We waited there for around half an hour, but they still did not show up. Eventually, we realized that we had lost them while on vacation.

We decided to split up to find my child and husband. My parents stayed at the elevator, while me and my in-laws went into the Basilica, figuring that maybe they went inside and were waiting for us there. Although it was crowded, we made a quick tour of the cathedral to see if we could find them. They weren't there.

I was starting to get scared. I had a picture of my baby daughter in my wallet, and started asking people if they had seen her, using my limited Italian. No, they had not. We didn't have any way to find out what happened, except to find them.

Eventually, we found them, waiting outside an exit to the Basilica. The ushers had taken them aside to tell them that they could not bring the stroller into the church. My husband had gone inside St. Peter's for a while, but he got tired holding our daughter while waiting for us. So he went outside, sat down, and started reading a book, oblivious to our frantic search.

Everyone was so tired after spending the morning searching for my husband and daughter, that we decided to go back to the hotel and forego seeing the Basilica. My parents never did get to see it. We were very happy to be back together again though. Vacation is nice, getting to see historical sites is great, but more importantly, motherhood is about being with your family.