AMSTERDAM -- It's like jumping off a cliff. It's impossible to fully express, like describing the flavour of chocolate without ever letting it melt on your tongue. It's a giant leap -- parenthood -- and you won't remember your life before it. This is how friends, family and co-workers have described Life After Kids. See movies now, they say, enjoy the Saturday paper now, and travel now, while it's just the two of you, no diapers, no stroller, no child in the back seat yelling, "Are we there yet?"
I was six months pregnant with my first child. I had always loved to travel and wondered how a baby would change that. Already, many trips were ruled out by my growing belly: flying in bush planes, hiking at high altitudes, sipping vintages on wine tours and, of course, visiting locales where the prospect of clean water and high-tech hospitals was shaky at best. Sure, many parents I knew, including my own, didn't burn their passports when children arrived on the scene -- a ski magazine editor told me that he and his wife zipped down mountains with babies in backpacks; colleagues were planning a trip to Peru this summer with their two grade-schoolers.
Still, whatever their calm assurances, I knew travel wouldn't be the same. So, on the eve of my third trimester, my husband, Mario, and I boarded a plane for a week-long babymoon among the quiet canals and brown cafés of Amsterdam.
The term was originally coined by British birth guru Sheila Kitzinger (who writes alarming things like, "Once your baby has engaged, you can often feel the head like a coconut hanging between your legs") to describe the magical days immediately after birth when parents bond intensely with their newborns. The expression has since grown to encompass family trips taken before toddler routines and tempers set in.
But, fuelled by the generation of double-income, well-travelled couples who are finally getting around to producing offspring, babymooning has also grown to be seen as the Last Chance to Travel Before Kids (or Before the Next Kid).
Hotels have jumped on the concept, creating upscale packages for expectant parents that feature such treats as spa massages, body pillows, milk and cookies before bedtime and baskets of gourmet pickles. For instance, Amoré by the Sea, a bed and breakfast on Vancouver Island, offers a tranquil retreat on the beaches near Victoria with a Babymoon package that includes an aromatherapy facial, sparkling (and non-alcoholic) apple juice and gourmet chocolates. The Once in a Babymoon deal at Beside Still Waters Farm in Willits, Calif., offers a luxury escape in country cottages, along with a "birth and beyond" delivery kit that includes a nursing gown and all-natural nipple cream.
However, I wanted more than a well-marketed hotel fling. I wanted to check another destination off my long list, and to make time for perhaps-soon-to-end pleasures. Babymooning seemed like a last chance for romance, to enjoy uninterrupted hours in art galleries, to linger over a foreign-brewed coffee, to see a movie, to finally read A Tale of Two Cities.
While I was leaving my library of maternity books at home -- for romance's sake, and to avert awkward moments in cafés when flipping to a page of a baby crowning in a home water birth -- the trip also seemed like an opportunity to prepare for a baby: to do pushups, to finalize names, to contemplate parenting and to slip in some Kegel exercises while gazing at Dutch masterpieces.
A babymoon would be the ideal time to enjoy the amazing changes taking place and to let time slow down for just a few moments before Mario and I jumped off that metaphorical cliff.
In many ways, Amsterdam is ideal babymoon territory: It is safe, very flat and steeped in culture (the museum's washrooms are the ideal fix for every pregnant woman's dilemma). The city is easy to get to (a seven-hour direct KLM flight from Toronto) and easy to navigate, as everyone from shoe-store clerks to taxi drivers speaks English. Amsterdam is, of course, famous for its red-light district and hashish-friendly "coffee houses," but six months into pregnancy it wasn't that hard to drop two more things from the to-do list.
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