You see, when you have young kids, time away from home is not so much a vacation as it is a change of scenery. The mere presence of palm trees does not mean that you will be spending hours on a lounge chair reading a book or that your meals will be leisurely and without of someone calling someone else a poop head. Even though you are in a five star hotel you are still going to be eating breakfast with your kids at the ass-crack of dawn. You'll just be eating it with a better view and the Cheerios you're eating will cost like ten times more.
The first time Husband and I took a vacation with Kid #1 it was to stay with my grandparents in their Naples condo and I cried actual tears of joy when we returned home. Between the stress of flying with a nine month old who was going through a "I will open and shut every door, window shade and airplane tray table I see fifteen hundred times before moving on" phase and having to go to the beach with a twenty pound diaper bag filled with sand toys and enough SPF to protect the entire population of Florida only to stay there for 15 minutes because Kid #1 was eating sand and needed to go down for a nap, the trip was NOT restful, relaxing, or even that enjoyable. Kid #1 didn't sleep well in the pack and play that we'd shoved into a stuffy walk-in closet that smelled like mothballs therefore I didn't sleep well. My grandfather seemed irritated when our meals were inhaled in under ten minutes because Kid #1 was climbing out of his high chair and my grandmother followed us around with a bottle of Lysol spraying everything the baby's little dirty fingertips touched. It was the first time I returned from a vacation more exhausted -physically and emotionally- than I'd been before the trip.
For our next vacation with kids we decided to try a fancy high-rise resort in Ft. Lauderdale. While the accommodations were "heavenly" I still spent much of the trip explaining that just because it was 'mini' didn't mean the vodka was for them and that I would have to dip into their 529 plans if they tore open that package of minibar m&m's, keeping the baby from throwing their toys off of the balcony and stopping the toddler from calling the concierge from the telephone that was mounted on the wall next to the toilet (Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to put a phone at just the right height for a two year old to grab?!). While my children abandoned half eaten platters of $18 chicken fingers on our lounge chairs to hang on me all afternoon in the pool I looked longingly at other guests - guests who didn't need to worry if they'd brought enough swim diapers - napping in the sun and was infinitely jealous.
Then a year or so ago Husband and I were hanging out with some friends, having a few drinks while the kids played together in the backyard and someone said "Wouldn't it be great if we could spend a week somewhere where we could do this EVERY night?"
Absolutely.
So, we rented a house in the Outer Banks with a pool and enough beds and bathrooms for all five families that was within walking distance to the beach and the countdown began.
For real, we had an app to count down the days.
This probably comes as a surprise to anyone who a. knows me and knows how high strung and prone to freaking out over little things like my kids screaming for ten hours in a car or being up all night because they are in a strange crib in a strange room I am or b. hears that there were ten adults and eleven kids involved in this equation.
In fact, the week before my trip whenever I told anyone that I was about to embark on a ten hour road trip with three kids to live in a house with four other families the responses ranged from "Good luck!" to "You might want to bring some Valium and a lot of alcohol."
Based on those responses, I started to get a little nervous about the whole thing. We were driving through the night to get to OBX, what if the kids were up all night and were overtired monsters when we arrived and someone drowned them in the pool to shut them up? What if the kids slept all night but Husband and I did NOT sleep all night and were too tired to watch the kids when we got there and one of them drowned because they went in the pool less than thirty minutes after eating (does anyone follow that rule anymore?)? What if the kids and I ALL slept and no one was awake to make sure Husband was still awake and he fell asleep at the wheel and drove the car into the ocean and we ALL drowned? Apparently I was a victim of a boating accident in a past life.
It's not unusual for me to go to the worst-case scenario first. Husband has repeatedly told me that I'm a very pessimistic person. I call it being realistic. I've found that my tendency to have exceedingly low expectations means I'm almost always pleasantly surprised when the things I'm worried about turn out to be not that bad, or in some cases even GOOD. Even if they don't look like what the average person would consider to be good.
Like, if I go to a restaurant expecting my kids to scream profanities at the other patrons, throw all of their food on the floor and expose themselves to the waist staff, when the only thing that goes wrong is that Kid #2 eats his dinner under the table instead of sitting at it I feel like I'm totally winning.
The same goes for the car ride. One diaper explosion and an hour and a half of "Are we there yet?" was nothing compared to the calamities I'd been envisioning in my head, even though after using the diaper changing station at the Seven Eleven in Virginia I could have used a bucket of bleach and a complimentary prescription for Cipro.
Similarly, I went into this past week's trip with low expectations and I'm happy to say I was more than pleasantly surprised by what came to pass. In short, I had a blast. Here are some of the reasons that traveling with four other families was one of our best trips ever:
Safety in Numbers
When I stumbled into the kitchen at six am with Kid #1 who'd just informed me that "The sun is up so I am up!" (Thanks, Frozen) there was always someone else already there. Sometimes they'd even made coffee. When Kid #2 was having one of his "I need you to HOLD ME" meltdowns poolside there was usually someone else there who's three year old had just finished his co-dependent breakdown who would offer to make me a poolside drink. At mealtimes the women fed the kids while the men stood around the grill and did...whatever it is men do around a grill (really, how many men does it take to flip a burger?) and we had the kitchen cleaned up and ready for an adults-only dinner by the time the charred meat appeared on the table. I started to "get" the whole polygamy thing.
Adult Company
Being a stay at home mom, I will readily admit that I am starved (famished!) for interaction with grown-ups during the week. I used to be pretty shy but now I find myself wandering up and down the aisles of Target searching for someone - anyone - who I even kind of sort of just a little bit know so that I can have a conversation that isn't about who pinched who first. Last week I was with adults all week long and it was awesome. Instead of having to draw the curtains and have lights out at seven pm and sit in a dark hotel room with three sleeping kids we could put the kids to bed and go out on the verandah and have more adult time and not feel like those people in Portugal who left their kid in their hotel room while they went out to dinner and never saw her again. I didn't have to send out fifty text messages in one day to my other stay at home mom friends just to feel like I wasn't alone in a land filled with tiny dictators. The people at Verizon probably think I drowned.
Relaxation (sort of)
Most days on this trip I did not see Kid #1 from eight am until eight pm. I'm not sure what he was doing but he didn't end up sunburned (much) or in jail so I'm guessing it was the usual pool-beach-hot tub thing that kids do on vacay. Kid #2 still demanded to be held from time to time but he also spent a fair amount of time (hours, even) with floaties on his arms bobbing around the pool without me, emerging only to potty (apparently I have the one kid who does NOT pee in a swimming pool) and eat Oreo cookies, which is what I'm pretty sure he subsisted on for the entire week. And even though Kid #3 is still pretty high maintenance in that he can't walk or talk or prepare his own meals, he still takes two naps a day. One day I was able to take a twenty minute nap on a float in the pool before someone woke me up because they needed a snack/more suntan lotion/a beer (ahem, Husband). That's the first daytime nap I've taken in over a year.
It was delicious.
Maybe my definition of relaxation has changed, but seeing my two older kids having fun in the water while my baby shoved sand in his diaper was the most relaxed I've been in months.
This is not to say it was the PERFECT vacation. Put five families in a house and find out what happens when people stop being polite and start being real and you get the Thirty-Something version of The Real World, complete with slammed doors, hurt feelings and couples doing IT in other people's bathrooms (You guys thought we didn't know! Ha!).
There was also the night that we took family photos on the beach. I was pumped. I wanted the pictures I'd seen so many of on facebook of suntanned families in crisp white shirts and khakis looking like the cover of WASP Living (Does such a magazine exist? If so I imagine one reads it while drinking dry martinis and listening to their children discuss the finer points of Polo - both the clothing brand and the sport) .
I don't know why I thought my three boys would stop being....themselves....long enough to fool anyone into thinking we were a civilized family of five who just happened to spend their evenings quietly strolling the beach holding hands as the North Carolina sun set in the distance. Foolishly I spent weeks coordinating our outfits for the shoot until we ended up looking like we'd all fallen into The Gap. The afternoon before the photos I dragged my crew into the bathtub and scrubbed the sand out of their hair and the cheetos stains off of their faces and made them sit LIKE STATUES on the couch while we waited for the photographer to arrive. I arranged for our family to go first to minimize the potential of someone jumping into the ocean fully dressed before the pictures even started.
The photographer arrived, we were ready to go, and then the next thing I knew Kid #1 was standing before me bright red and hysterical because he had tripped going up some stairs and banged his shin, causing it to swell into such a large bump I thought there was a bone sticking out of his leg. I quickly told the second family in line to take our place and we would meet them at the beach after he calmed down. Five minutes and an ice pack later, we limped our way to the shore.
I should mention it was 97 degrees that day. That means that in the five minutes it took for us to walk from our house to the beach the other two kids' faces were as scarlet as Kid #1's and their hairlines were damp with sweat. That means that when Kid #2 demanded I carry him piggy back up the stairs (apparently he was having sympathy pains for his brother) to the beach I could feel tiny rivulets of sweat trickling down my back and puddling in my jeans (who thought jeans were a good idea for a beach portrait anyway? Oh yeah, me). That means that as soon as I put Kid #3 down on the sand he started screaming because it felt like I was trying to get him to take his first steps on burning hot coals. In the five minutes it took for us to wait for the first family to finish up, my kids went from freshly bathed mensches to sweaty miserable monsters and I wasn't faring much better.
As for the shoot itself let me just say this. While the other four families in our group came back to the house beaming with pleasure because in their 20 minute session the photographer captured them laughing in the sand and frolicking in the waves our session lasted barely ten before the photographer declared "I think I have enough good shots to work with" (read: your kids haven't stopped crying since you got here and I don't think I'll be able to Photoshop the sweat stains off of your shirts). We returned to the house frustrated, crying, and utterly deflated by the whole experience. The kids weren't too happy either.
Those pictures might have been the low point of the week for me, which, if you think about it, is not so bad. Over time I've come to realize that even if every part a family vacation doesn't go as planned or is far from the relaxing vacations of my life pre-kids, it is still a chance be somewhere different, to have (unless there's a World Cup soccer match on) Husband's undivided attention (and by attention I mean diaper changing assistance) and to watch my kids have the time of their lives digging holes in the sand and jumping in and out of ocean waves... even if when I ask them what their favorite part of the trip was they reply "sleeping in bunk beds."
As always very entertaining... glad you had "another" time of your life!
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