Vacation 2011. I’m not much of a vacation guy, I tend to be kind of frantic after a day or two, I don’t sit around and do nothing very well. We tended not to do annual vacations, both because of expense, and coordinating our schedules. I’ve also discovered that part of skipping vacations was trying to figure out where and what the vacation would encompass.
This year the mom and the new boyfriend took the kids to the coast, stayed in, what the kids describe as a huge resort, and a beach house, that my daughter said isn’t a beach house because it’s not on the beach. It was 2 blocks from the beach. She seemed fairly upset that they kept calling it a beach house.
I had a trip planned to visit family, and a friend that runs cabins in the forest. It would mean a lot of driving and covering some of the territory they covered with mom, but it was different destinations and would include an theme park, which is one of my favorite vacation stops. My vacation also included work. W visited and fixed computers and websites, and covered the bills. It saved hundreds of dollars, but meant the kids had to find their own things to do for a few hours while I paid for the trip.
We spent hours in the van, listening to music, stories, talking, and laughing. My daughter was the navigator, programming the gps, finding things on the phone, and helping pick out places to stop. We worked on not having too much of a schedule, so we could opt to take some time off to go do unexpected things. We toured a candy factory, but missed the cheese company tour. The kids found a Chinese buffet that had an amazing variety, and they ate tons of food.
Oddly the theme park wasn’t the highlight of their trip, the hotel pool on the first and last days seemed to be their favorite. Wee went to target and bought goggles and some diving toys, and they had a great time playing with them.
I continue to learn how much less stressful my life is being the sole decision maker. I might still be married if I hadn’t have tried so hard to be what she wanted me to be, and was just who I am. Of course, she may have left years earlier.
The lesson? I am learning to just be me, and when someone shows up that I really fall for, I need to keep being me, being the dad that I am, and let her be who she is, and it will work, or it won’t.
For kids it’s all about the time we spend with them. You probably could have gone to some cruddy hotel just up the road and they would have been just as happy.
All the responsibility, half the time, twice the love.