HAVE BABY, WILL TRAVEL
Parenthood doesn’t have to tie you, and your wanderlust, down: Follow this travel-loving mom’s lead and pack up the kids and go
Veteran traveler Adrian Jarosz has stamps in his passport, can sleep on a plane and has six international trips under his belt. He is 3 years old. “If we drive past an airport, he cries if he can’t fly on a plane,” says his mom, Agatha Jarosz, of South Lyon, Mich.
She sees no reason Adrian should stay home when he could be flying to Europe or sampling Central America. Due with her second child in July, she plans to take both children to Poland next year.
Adrian probably won’t remember a single one of his baby travels, which has taken him to Poland twice, Curacao, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, St. Martin, Martinique and 10 states. But his mother says there’s a larger life lesson for her son.
“Maybe the travel will make him more open,” she says. “Maybe it will make him enjoy different things instead of being scared.”
SEEING THE WORLD
American women are having fewer children than ever. Nearly half of women ages 15 to 44 are childless, according to new U.S. Census data, up from 42% in 2000. Part of that trend could stem from the belief that if you have a baby, your traveling days come to a screeching halt.
Wrong, says Jarosz, 30. She grew up with the travel bug and has been to 58 countries and territories and 33 states, most of them with her father, grandmother or husband, Mariusz. For the past eight years, the family has used Patricia Schultz’s 1,000 Places To See Before you Die as a guidebook, checking off the countries they have visited.
Now, Adrian is the fourth generation to join the family quest.
“Any time he packs his little suitcase, he thinks he’s going on a plane,” she says. “Recently, when we went to Curacao, there was ice on the runway and we sat on the plane for three hours before takeoff. Then we missed our connection and had to take another connection that was four hours late, and we thought he would be so tired.
“It was a 15-hour trip. When he got off, he said, ‘ More plane, please.’ ”
Friend Heidi Schick of Rochester, Mich., says Agatha’s attitude is changing her ideas about traveling with children — and even about having children.
“Agatha is my most adventurous friend. She’s been everywhere,” she says. “It’s really amazing to see her still following her passion, even with a little one. She’s a very calm person. She’s a problem-solver.” And it makes Schick realize that traveling with children “would not be such an obstacle.”
FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT
Get Jarosz talking about travel, and you soon realize there is more to her motivation than just taking vacations. The ability to travel freely is something her family never takes for granted.
Jarosz, born in 1985, lived in Poland until she was 7. Her parents and grandparents remember pre-1989 Communist rule there and its restrictions on travel, when their passports were held, phones were tapped and the places they could go were limited.
Her father, Jack Duszynski of South Lyon, recalls years when “we had restrictions on the passport. We could travel around Poland and some other Communist countries the government allowed us,” but few other places.
As soon as the family moved to the USA in 1992, Agatha’s father started taking his only child on trips all over the world — Paris, Argentina, even Australia. Now, it’s Adrian’s turn. “He’s the next generation,” Duszynski says. “He wants to travel as much as he can, and he always asks: ‘When are we going to go for the plane? When are we going to go for the hotel?’ ”
As for the complications of traveling with his daughter and tiny grandson: “She helps me, so if I can help her raise the boy, it’s a pleasure to me. It’s very perfect.”
A WORLD AWAITS
Jarosz concedes that traveling with a child, even an easygoing one like Adrian, is not as simple as traveling in her carefree single days. Still, it’s worth it, she wants to tell other young mothers.
“You can still do the trips,” she says. “You might not be able to pack in as much or sleep on trains in Europe, but you can do it. It’s worth it.”
As the afternoon sun streams into her dining room in South Lyon, Jarosz looks at her son and hugs him, then lets him go.
“For now, he just loves the beach and plane,” she says. When they take road trips, she is happy to see him “looking out the window, interested in his surroundings, not staring at a tablet or a TV.”
She hopes someday he will appreciate “how absolutely lucky he is to live in a place that he can take his passport and see this beautiful world and all the amazing people in it.”