Blogs Are The BEST

While we had always aimed to travel in the year prior to Maddy starting school, we still had not committed to it.  At the beginning of this year, I gave us til May to do so. Come May, we committed. 
It was a scary, but exciting feeling--finally committing to the idea.  I then jumped on Lonely Planet and checked out the Thorn Tree forum for Traveling With Children and was surprised to find so many families out there currently doing it, just done it, or about to do it!  Started following a few blogs too, whom I'd like to reference: Our Travel Lifestyle :: Changing your families life for the better , Global Prices' Family RTW Trip, Rymans At Large and now fourdotsonthemap.

While Jim and I have great experience traveling on a budget, these blogs were a great starting point for providing insight to traveling with children. Naturally I had a lot of questions regarding the logistics of traveling with young children, such as their ability to keep up using their own 2 legs (ie without strollers), toys/entertainment.  The first blog (Our Travel Lifestyle) was GREAT in providing lots of details with respect to this, and so much more that I hadn't considered, such as the advantages of traveling with an iPod and laptop, and the issue of vaccinations.  The latter blog (fourdotsonthemap) raised the issue of contents storage with respect to storing our stuff and finding an insurer to insure it (harder than i'd imagine).  These two blogs have also been extremely helpful as not only do they have 2 children too who are roughly the same age as ours but they are also from Australia.  So while some questions were answered, many more were raised--networking and information sharing at its best--LOVE IT!!  Thanks guys!!!!

So now the lists begin!  Pre-Trip To Do Lists, Packing Lists, Shopping Lists, Change-of-Address Lists, --arghh.  My head is starting to reel.