I thought I'd packed enough formula. I really did. I'd done the calculations—sort of, in that vague way you do when you're throwing things into a suitcase at 10 PM the night before a trip while your husband keeps saying "are you almost ready" and your toddler is pulling clothes out of the dresser faster than you can pack them. I'd counted the number of days we'd be gone, multiplied by the approximate number of bottles per day, added a couple extra for emergencies, and thrown in one more can just to be safe. The math felt solid. The math was not solid. The math was about as solid as a wet paper towel.
We were heading out to the Oregon Coast for what was supposed to be a relaxing long weekend—Mark, me, Lily (about eight months at the time), and approximately a mountain of of baby gear stuffed into our Honda CR-V. We'd rented a little cabin near Cannon Beach, the kind with a kitchenette and a porch and a view of the ocean that makes you forget you spent the previous three hours trapped in a car with a screaming infant. I'd been dreaming about this trip for weeks. The salt air. The long walks on the beach. The seafood restaurant Mark had found that supposedly had the best clam chowder on the coast. I'd pictured myself sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee, watching the sunset while Lily napped peacefully inside.
Reader, none of that happened the way I pictured it. None of it.
The trouble started before we even left Portland. We'd gotten maybe twenty minutes west of the city, just past the turnoff for Forest Park, when Lily decided she was hungry. Not "I'll wait until we stop for lunch" hungry. Not "give me a snack" hungry. The kind of hungry where the world is ending and the only thing that can save it is a bottle RIGHT NOW. She was screaming. Not crying—screaming. The particular scream that bypasses your ears and goes straight to the part of your brain responsible for fight or flight. I was in the passenger seat, twisted around trying to comfort her, one arm bent at an angle that would later require a chiropractor visit.
Mark, to his credit, kept driving. "Should I pull over?" he asked.
"Where?" I said. "We're on a highway. There's nowhere to pull over."
This is the thing about traveling with a formula-fed baby that nobody tells you. You can't just feed them anywhere. You need water. You need the powder. You need a clean bottle. You need some way to mix them together without spilling formula all over the car upholstery. You need, ideally, a stable surface and two hands and maybe a little bit of light so you can see what you're doing. You need conditions that are basically impossible to achieve in a moving vehicle on a winding highway while your baby screams like she's being personally victimized by the concept of travel.
I'd brought a little formula dispenser—one of those plastic containers with separate compartments so you can pre-measure powder for multiple bottles. I'd pre-filled a couple bottles with the right amount of water. In theory, all I had to do was dump the powder into the water, shake, and feed. In theory. In practice, I was trying to do this while contorted in the passenger seat with one hand, my body twisted at an angle that would make a yoga instructor wince. Formula powder went everywhere. On my lap. On the center console. On the seat belt. A fine white dust settled over the gear shift like the world's least appetizing snow.
The bottle I eventually produced was... approximately correct. Maybe. The ratio was probably a little off. The temperature was definitely off—room temperature water from a bottle that had been sitting in the car for an hour. Lily didn't care. She grabbed the bottle and drank like she'd never seen food before, and the sudden silence in the car was so profound that Mark and I both exhaled at the same time.
"That was stressful," Mark said.
"We're not even to the coast yet," I said.
We stopped at a rest area somewhere past the coastal range. You know those rest stops—the ones with the concrete bathrooms and the picnic tables that have been there since probably the 1970s and the vending machines that only take exact change. I took Lily to the bathroom to change her diaper, and that's when I discovered the other thing nobody tells you about traveling with a baby. The diaper blowout that happens specifically and only when you are at least an hour from your destination and have packed exactly enough spare outfits. Too few, it turns out. Way too few.
I won't describe the blowout in detail. Some things are sacred. But I will say that I used up one of our emergency outfits, and then I stood in the rest stop bathroom holding a bag of soiled clothing and wondering if this trip had been a mistake. Maybe we should have just stayed home. Maybe traveling with a baby is something other people do—braver people, more organized people, people who don't end up with formula powder in their hair and poop on their sleeve before noon.
But we got back in the car. What else were we going to do? We'd already paid for the cabin.
The cabin, when we finally arrived, was lovely. Genuinely lovely. The kind of place that would have been perfect for a relaxing weekend if we hadn't arrived frazzled and exhausted and covered in various substances. It had a little kitchen with a microwave and a mini-fridge and a coffeemaker, which I'd planned to use for heating water for bottles. Except the coffeemaker was broken. Because of course it was. Because the universe has a sense of humor and that humor is specifically targeted at parents trying to heat formula in unfamiliar kitchens.
I ended up heating water in a saucepan on the stove, like a pioneer woman. Mark held Lily while I stood over the stove testing water temperature on my wrist the way the NICU nurses taught me, trying to get it warm enough but not too warm, trying not to think about how much easier this would be if we'd just stayed home with our bottle warmer and our formula pitcher and our carefully organized feeding station.
And then—just when I thought we'd gotten through the worst of it—I realized I'd left the extra can of formula in the car. The car that Mark had parked at the top of a very steep, very gravelly driveway. I looked out the window. It was raining. Of course it was raining. This is the Oregon Coast. It's always raining.
I want to tell you about a family I met once, back when I was working at OHSU. They'd come in for a feeding consultation because their daughter wasn't gaining weight, and somewhere in the conversation they mentioned they'd been on a road trip the month before. A cross-country road trip. With a four months. On formula. I must have looked horrified because the mom laughed and said, "You figure it out. You don't have a choice, so you just figure it out."
At the time I thought she was remarkably calm about the whole thing. Now I understand that she wasn't calm—she'd just already been through it. She'd already figured it out. She'd already done the thing where you're heating formula water in a hotel coffee maker at 2 AM while your baby screams and your spouse tries to bounce her in a strange dark room that smells like someone else's laundry detergent. She'd already learned that traveling with a formula-fed baby is not impossible, it's just... improvisational. You figure it out. You don't have a choice.
I figured it out. I put on my rain jacket and walked up the gravel driveway in the dark and the drizzle and I got the formula can from the car. I mixed the bottle in the cabin kitchen with the saucepan-warmed water. I fed Lily while sitting on a strange couch in a strange room, looking out at the ocean through rain-streaked windows, and she drank her bottle and fell asleep on my shoulder and for a minute—just a minute—everything was peaceful.
The rest of the trip was... mixed. Some moments were genuinely magical—Lily's face the first time she saw the ocean, her tiny fingers reaching toward the waves like she could grab them. A seafood dinner where she gummed a sourdough roll while Mark and I actually had a conversation that wasn't about feeding schedules or diaper output. A long walk on the beach where she fell asleep in the carrier and I felt, for maybe an hour, like one of those serene outdoorsy moms you see in Patagonia catalogs.
Other moments were less magical. There was the middle-of-the-night feed where I couldn't find the formula scoop and had to estimate the powder using a teaspoon from the cabin's mismatched silverware set. (I know. After the whole tablespoon incident with Mark, you'd think I'd have learned. But desperate times.) There was the gas station stop where we realized we'd left the bottle brush at home and had to wash bottles with paper towels and dish soap and a lot of prayers. There was the moment when Lily decided she was done with the car seat and screamed for the last almost an hour of the drive home, and Mark and I sat in the front seats not talking, just surviving, counting down the miles until our exit.
But we figured it out. That's the thing I keep coming back to. We figured it out. The trip wasn't perfect—nothing about parenting is perfect—but we did it. We left the house with a baby and a car full of gear and we drove to the coast and we came back. Everyone survived. Everyone was fed. The formula powder eventually got vacuumed out of the car upholstery.
Here's what I learned about traveling with formula, for the next time or for anyone who's planning their first trip and panicking a little:
Bring more formula than you think you need. Then bring a little more. The "extra" can you throw in at the last minute is not extra—it's the one you'll actually use when the first can runs out sooner than expected or gets spilled in the trunk or mysteriously vanishes from the diaper bag at the exact moment you need it.
Pre-measure if you can. Those little formula dispensers with separate compartments are worth their weight in gold. Pre-fill bottles with the right amount of water before you leave. It makes the in-car mixing marginally less chaotic.
A portable bottle warmer that plugs into the car's power outlet sounds ridiculous and excessive until you're trying to warm a bottle at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere. Just get one. Trust me.
Accept that things will go wrong. Something will spill. Something will be forgotten. The baby will have a blowout at the least convenient moment. The coffeemaker will be broken. The rain will start the moment you need to walk to the car. This is not a failure of planning. This is just what happens when you travel with small humans. The trip is not about avoiding chaos—it's about surviving the chaos together and maybe, if you're lucky, having a few good moments along the way.
Lower your expectations. Then lower them again. You are not going to have a serene vacation. You're going to have a parenting experience that happens to take place in a different location. The baby doesn't know you're on vacation. The baby is just being a baby, except now the baby is in a strange place with strange sounds and strange smells and her usual routines are disrupted. She's going to be fussy. You're going to be tired. That's okay. That's normal. That's just parenting on the road.
We drove home on a Sunday. The rain had cleared, finally, and the coast was doing that thing where the light turns golden and the ocean looks like it's made of melted silver. Lily slept in her car seat, exhausted from the weekend, her cheek smushed against the strap, her mouth slightly open. Mark was driving. I was staring out the window at the water, thinking about how different this trip had been from what I'd imagined. Not worse, exactly. Just different. More chaotic. More exhausting. More real.
I used to think traveling with a baby was something you did after you had everything figured out—after the sleep schedule was established, after the feeding routine was solid, after you'd become one of those competent parents who always has the right supplies and never runs out of wipes. But that version of parenthood doesn't exist. There's no moment when everything is figured out. There's just the trip, and the baby, and whatever chaos comes with them. You figure it out as you go. You don't have a choice.
The cabin was lovely, by the way. Even with the broken coffeemaker. Even with the rain. Even with the middle-of-the-night formula mixing and the gas station bottle washing and the almost an hour of screaming on the drive home. We sat on the porch one evening—the only evening it didn't rain—and watched the sun set over the Pacific. Lily was on my lap, grabbing at my hair, making those little babbling sounds that weren't quite words yet. Mark was next to me, his hand on my knee. The sky went pink and orange and purple, the colors reflecting off the water.
"We should do this again," Mark said.
"Give me a few months to recover first," I said.
But we will. We'll do it again. Next time I'll pack more formula. Next time I'll check the coffeemaker before we unpack. Next time I'll bring twice as many emergency outfits. Next time something else will go wrong—something I haven't even thought to prepare for—and I'll figure that out too. Because that's what traveling with a baby is. It's not a vacation. It's an adventure. Messy, exhausting, occasionally magical. Like parenting itself.
— From Portland with exhaustion
