Staying in a condo feels like playing house. We still have to do things like cook and do dishes, but they’re different dishes and there aren’t that many of them. As with playing house, there are some inconveniences. We don’t have the cooking tools we’re accustomed to and there is always some item which we’ve forgotten at home or lost somewhere in transit. Yet somehow staying in a condo feels vacationy while doing the same things at home does not.

I’m pleased that we’ve arrived at a stage where vacation trips can actually be relaxing instead of differently stressful. Babies and toddlers are very expressive when their routines are disrupted and that usually manifests as meltdowns any time of day or as wakefulness when everyone else wants to be sleeping. Being away from home means that parents have left behind some of their usual coping strategies for managing their kids. I suppose that some young kids are easy travelers. Mine loved taking trips and going new places, but when we did I had to increase my level of parental oversight. New places meant new ideas in young heads and not all of those new ideas were safe. Heads full of new ideas did not go to sleep easily. New surroundings also meant that sibling frictions busted out in aggravating ways and required mediation. During most of my years of parenting “vacation” meant being short on sleep and exhausted from extra supervision. It also meant visiting with loved ones, interesting new experiences, and growing knowledge for my kids. (As an example: Why I Love Jellyfish.) The trips we took were worth it, but they were in no way relaxing.

Things are different now. Some of this is the result of my kids getting older, but much of it is us finally learning how to structure our vacations in ways that work for our family. Then we repeated that structure often enough that we all know what to expect. Instead of vacation being a disruption to all of our patterns, we just fall into our vacation patterns instead of our at home patterns. I suspect the same could be accomplished for younger children, but there is the added difficulty that babies and toddlers hit developmental milestones so very quickly. Trips taken six months apart will be different experiences because the child has changed so much.

We take our family trips to places we can reach by driving in five hours or less. At some point we may venture into family travel by air, but it is cost prohibitive for six people. Also, airports are inherently stressful. For us traveling to go stay with other people at their house is stressful, even when we love the people. Staying in a hotel room is similarly stressful because we’re all on top of each other constantly. Renting a condo or staying at a cabin has made it possible for vacation to be relaxing. So we pick a condo where we can go do interesting things for half or all of the days and where we can come back and relax in the evenings. I’ve learned that bringing along some of our usual things like mobile devices means that we are able to play familiar games along with new ones.

Someday we’ll be more adventuresome. We’ll pick a vacation trip that is less focused on optimizing relaxation and more focused on going new places and stretching ourselves. But right now what we need from our vacations is being together outside our regular round of things. Playing house in a condo accomplishes that nicely.

I remember being in the hospital, having just given birth to my fourth child. Howard was there too, I think the new little guy was tucked into the crook of Howard’s arm. This sort of scene is often accompanied by glowing descriptions of the wonder of life and how all of the stress is worth it, rhapsodies on the miracle of birth. That was certainly how the story of my first birth went. We were in a glow every time we looked at her, even when we felt exhausted or stressed. My second and third births also had a measure of glow, but not to the extent of that first one. The fourth birth was different. I remember feeling exhausted and somewhat in despair. I wanted to feel glowing and happy. I knew that I would love this new little person with all my heart. I was already doing everything to keep him safe and cared for, but it did not feel glowing on that day. We were too exhausted from Howard’s stressful work schedule, from four days of stop-and-go labor, from sleeping poorly in a hospital room, from knowing that birth is only the beginning of all the caretaking. I knew that tiny miracle represented weeks and months of insufficient sleep. It was hard to feel happy about that when I was feeling so worn out.

My mother came for all of my births. After my first birth she took care of me as I learned how to care for a newborn. For the rest, she took care of my older kids, plying them with stories and games while I did most of the infant care. Each time she stayed for about a week, which was just enough time for me to want to be in charge again. That fourth time she stayed for two and when she left I still wasn’t quite ready to manage it all.

In hindsight I’m pretty sure I had low level postpartum depression after that fourth birth. I didn’t recognize it because I’d not experienced it with the others. I remember holding my son and telling him he needed to hurry up and learn how to smile at me, because I needed some sort of a reward. He did smile a few weeks later and I emerged from fatigue and difficulty.

Ten years have passed and the pictures of my newborn son make me feel all mushy and happy, just as the pictures of my other three children do. The fact that I did not feel glowing and euphoric in the hours following his birth, or that I struggled for weeks afterward, does not matter. Sometimes love arrives in a rush, sometimes it seeps in unnoticed and fills the spaces. Either way, what matters is the constant nurturing and building of a relationship. My baby boy is now ten years old. The things I’ve done to build a relationship with him these past six months matters far more than whether I chose to bottle feed or if I had to take breaks from his fussing when he was two weeks old.

There are thousands of ways to do things wrong as a parent, but there are also thousands of second and third chances. I am grateful for this every day.

We were at an evening picnic on a school night. It was a happy reunion with long time family friends whom we’ve not seen for quite awhile. The weather was lovely, the canyon scenery was stunning, food was consumed, and the kids had run around for hours. Howard and I began to gather our things when one of our friends said
“Leaving already?”
Most everyone else was still settled in for visiting.
“We’ve got to go. The kids have homework” I answered.
The friend waved a hand as if to wipe out the work to be done “Just let it go. they’re smart college-bound kids. It won’t hurt to let it slide for one day.”
I paused for a fraction of a second before answering, because I could see her point. Life should be arranged so that sometimes the work can bend around the fun. However I knew my kids and my family. We needed to get home. Also I had to process the implication that we were high-stress college-focused people. Yes my kids needed to focus on homework, but not because of years-off college. We needed to return to our regular routine because it was the best way to make sure the rest of the evening and the next day were good. Patch would quite happily ignore homework and play all night. But then he would turn into a quivering bundle of stress when he arrived at school with the work not done. All three kids needed to bathe. They also needed time to wind down lest bedtime be made out of arguments.

In that fraction-of-a-second pause I realized that I have high intensity kids who get wound up and anxious about things. My friend’s kids and grandkids are generally easy going. I also knew that if I sat down and explained all of this, she would understand because she is a smart and kind lady. She was just having fun with everyone gathered together and didn’t want it to be over quite yet. I agreed with her. The gathering was really fun, but my family needed to leave while fun was still being had, because the alternative was to leave because someone had a meltdown. I smiled and said “We really do need to get home, but we should do this again soon.”

Hugs were shared and we went home.