Fran and her family graciously treated us to a day at the National Aquarium in Baltimore for our birthdays.  TWC has another entry on how awesome the Aquarium is, so rather than repeat that (although it really is), I'm thinking that a discussion about what it's like to travel with two toddlers might be interesting.

The main things I learned were that while everyone has different parenting styles, it works best if every parent parents every child, as needed.  For instance, I was wiped out from a fight about whether my son could go into the dolphin tank or not, so Fran's husband took over the job of getting lunch into Hyperboy's mouth (also, they were sitting next to each other, as my son had left me to go sit with Fran's daughter).

Another thing I learned, that Fran did really well, was to set the rules in advance, and repeat them during the day.  We'd never been to the Aquarium before, and they were old hands.  This meant they knew where to go and did not need to spend very much time at any exhibit.  Repeating constantly to my son that he needed to hold someone's hand from our team helped a lot.

The final lesson that I swear someday I will learn is that no matter how many cool things the travel-writer mothers have in mind, the toddlers will wear themselves and at least one parent out after about 4 hours.