The vacation and the family trip

I think our kids have a reverse internal alarm clock. Do you have a morning meeting - need to rush, rush, rush? They’ll do their best to sleep until 8am. This morning, the first morning of our first real vacation in 6 years, our flight not until mid-day, Cody was in our room before 6am.

To make a real vacation, you have to get rid of the kids, and so our first stop is Houston. It’s not a vacation if you bring kids. It’s a family trip. The kids reminded us of this fact on the way there. Just past airport security the kids have begged their way into an Auntie Annie’s pretzel and a pair of Crocs each. With vacation on the brain, we’re in a charitable mood, and so we’re in-the-hole $100 within the first 20 feet of the terminal.

Upon arrival to the gate, we learned to our dismay that the airplane was a regional jet with no in-seat entertainment. Past flights have taught us this lesson – your options are three hours of misery or paying for the in-flight DirectTV. Sure it’s a little expensive at $7.99, but worth every penny. They could charge $100 and we’d do it.

Without the entertainment we’re in for more of a challenge. Putting Cody in one of these flying cigar tubes is like putting a hornet in a jar and shaking it. Once the batteries run out on his leap pad (aargh!) he’s busy calling his sister the most offensive name he can think of, nakedpants, and eating cheese crackers using the messiest method I could ever conceive (open the sandwich, scrape out the cheese with your fingers, bash the crackers on the tray until thoroughly crumbed). He keeps the rest of the flight well informed of his status throughout the duration (“Mommy, I bless-you’d on the window!” at full volume) and his search for batman watches in the SkyMall catalogue proves fruitless.

Chiara does better pretending to do Sudoku in the magazine. But halfway through the flight she wants her old shoes back- the entertainment value of $34.99 has already run out.

Side note- if our weekend getaways are any guide, we will spend a great deal of our vacation missing the kids. It’s one of the great ironies of parenting: Most of the time I spend away from the kids I wish I was with them; When I’m with them I daydream about vacations. Hopefully Hawaii is amazing enough to make it worth the sacrifice.