Vacation with Kids

This isn’t an essay from a freshmen English class, but we’re going to start with a dictionary definition anyway. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word vocation thusly:

To spend a period of time devoted to leisure or recreation instead of work, school, etc.; esp. to do so away from home or while travelling; to take a vacation or holiday.

This means, whatever parents are doing with young kids on “vacation” it’s almost assuredly not vacation. Especially for moms. My sister-in-law once described what it’s like for a mom to go on vacation with toddlers as, “doing all the stuff you do at home except you don’t know where anything is.”

Add in the pre-trip packing and post-trip unpacking and one starts to marvel at how many families take trips at all.

We were recently on a family reunion vacation where the juxtaposition of parent experience and child experience was on stark display. There were 18 kids under 13-years-old and 10 adults. It takes a lot of work from the adults to produce a “period of time devoted to leisure or recreation” for kids.

I think you could characterize the vacation for the dads as a few days where we stay up way later than normal and then get up just as early or earlier than normal to do things with the kids. Part of the staying up late is because it’s the only time the adults can talk without kids around, but also part of it is because it’s not vacation if you’re not experiencing self-imposed sleep deprivation.

Speaking of sleep, what is with kids morphing into early birds on vacation? The sun barely scraped the bottom of the horizon before every kid was chirping like a bird at dawn. In the vacation house we stayed in 12 of the kids were in the third-floor bunk room and it sounded like a forest of birds warbling and tweeting every morning at sun up.

The good thing is, the birds flew the coop almost as soon as they woke up and their chirping was drowned out by them thunderously stampeding down two flights of stairs.

I’m not complaining. Really. Parents forfeit a lot of experiences and personal leisure when they have kids and that’s how it should be. Laughing about the reality of vacationing with kids is more like reveling in the comradery you have with other parents than griping about the difficulties. Plus, the difficulties dads and moms put up with or put themselves through in order to create vacation memories for kids is one of those admirable sacrifices parenting is all about.

During the trip one of the kids went to bed and his uncle was sitting in a chair in the kitchen. When the kid came downstairs early in the morning the uncle was in that chair and the kid concluded his uncle must have stayed up all night and never left the chair.

You could tell the kid thought this all made sense and maybe even derived a sense of comfort from thinking his uncle was always awake and standing watch. That’s a good analogy to parents on vacation. The kids don’t see half of what goes into it and depersonalize all the individual adults into categories like grandparents, aunts, uncles, and parents.

But having uncles that are always awake, and aunts that are always smiling, grandparents to tell goodnight to, and Dad and Mom to play games with sure makes a vacation for a kid.