All by Ourselves

Kids will still fight. Kids will still whine. Kids will still get injured. They will still need baths. They will still need to be fed. They will still painfully debate over who will be Boots and who will be Backpack in the Dora Special Edition of Candyland. They will still pee the bed. And I will still do laundry at 3 am. But the difference is, when on vacation, we now have the time and patience to deal with it. Whether it is the fact I can sleep in (until 8 on a good day), have no work stress (or at least pressing work stresses) or that there is just nothing (I mean nothing) on the agenda for any of our afternoons, these activities which usually cause my blood pressure to go up and my nerves to come undone, just seem much more doable on vacation.

And this was the point of our trip. For the first time in five years – excluding a weekend in Indy – we went on vacation by ourselves. No grandparents. No cousins. No friends. No Aunts and Uncles. No help. No free babysitting. No group play. No big crowds around a bonfire late at night. Just Andy and I and the two little ones we unfortunately do not get to see as much as we like during our normal hectic, employed full-time and more, lives. And with this I left my work laptop at home, along with the desire to clean, organize closets, plan for kindergarten (Ok, I did some of that), mentally design and decorate my future dining room and check in with work every ten minutes even when I am off duty because my office is always just ten feet away. And with that, we re-discovered how funny, sweet, OLD, talkative and entertaining our kids are … that Alex has hair (I mean real little boy hair) on his legs and the highlight in his life thus far (or at least in the past three months) is bowling a 107 and that Avery’s favorite color is purple (not pink) and she wants to get married, have babies and take those babies to a lake on vacation someday. This trip can only get better and more interesting despite having to play referee, nurse and cleaning lady every now and then. It is all so well worth it.