When you travel with kids, you have to take your life with you. You schlep your entire life, dietary restrictions, and schedule to a foreign land, and you attempt to reinstall that regular life on top of whatever conditions you find at the place you're staying.

So it's just you, doing your regular life, only instead of doing it in your regular place, you're cutting grapes while sidestepping toddler murdering implements camouflaged in what looks like a regular house but is really an idyllic death trap.

It's just you, doing your regular life, cleaning regurgitated strawberry pulp out of the rented high chair, finding a bowl of myriad throat-shaped items in a candy dish under the table.

Under the table. Obviously. That's where I keep my choking quarter.

It's just you, doing your regular life, setting up a coloring station at the dining room table. Right next to the wrought-iron spikes.

It's just you, doing your regular life, telling the kids to run up and down the hall to burn off some energy. Except they discover a door that cannot be locked.

That leads directly into the street.

Chicken? CHICKEN?!?

It's just you, your curious toddlers, one bare outlet per square foot, and a vast selection of sharp metal outlet-hole-shaped poking instruments at chubby-hand level in every room!

It hasn't exactly been a restful trip. But learn from me and add these to your packing list the next time you take the kids on a trip:

Outlet covers

Doorknob covers

Sliding door locks

Painters tape

Zip ties

Leashes for the children (don't be too proud.)

And you might make it out alive.

Godspeed, comrade.