I don’t love the idea of vacations. Time off, I can handle. With time off, you’re taking a day for yourself, or a day to get something done. It can be impromptu. Vacations, for me anyway, are anything but.
I am not confident enough and relaxed enough a traveler to simply arrive in a place and feel at ease getting the lay of the land while I am there. I also do not enjoy the minutiae of planning enough to have the weeks of research and time-lining that lead up to a vacation be considered part of the allure. Resort vacationing is probably the only style of vacation that I could slide into pretty easily, but the problem there tends to be the expense.
Now, toss having to wrangle kids into the mix and vacations are something that I tend to find mildly terrifying. I hate to always put it on the little man, but Matthew is an X-factor and it’s really hard to get him to be cool in any given situation. Chances are, if he knows you want him to be cool, that increases the odds that he’ll take things in another direction. If we take it easy on a trip and spend a lot of time chilling in a hotel room, it just turns into him bouncing off the walls and assaulting his siblings. If we have ourselves scheduled event-to-event-to-event then he’s griping about someone not carrying him everywhere and having an uncanny tendency to trip over and fall off of every single thing.
This brings us to our first family trip. At some point in the not-to-distant past Matthew had mentioned wanting to go to the Jelly Belly factory, which is located about 60-90 minutes north-east of San Francisco in an area called Fairfield. Janelle and I figured… why not? It’s as good as any starting point for a family trip and it has the added bonus of being a special outing for the middle child. We booked flights. We hunted down hotels that were a good mix of cost and location. We researched parks and museums and fun restaurants in the area. We plotted the best flow each day for what we were going to do. We pinged friends and relatives in the area to get their advice. We went after it, spending whole evenings trying to make sure we had covered our bases.
The whole time, I had to keep suppressing my tendency to consider it a foregone conclusion that the trip would suck. I didn’t want to doom myself by psyching myself into hating everything on principle, so I was working hard to focus on the positives. Not thinking about the boys slapping at one another or Maya crying because who knows why with toddlers, but thinking about Matthew getting to go on his first airplane, or getting larger-than-reasonable ice cream sundaes, or checking out sea lions right up close at the pier. I don’t know how much it was working… but I was putting forth the effort.
And then the day came. Saturday morning, amidst a flurry of packing prep and after an early morning baseball practice for Joshua, we notice that Maya feels warm. Sure enough, she’s pulling a fever. Immediately, Janelle and I have to start doing a lot of weighing of options. It was an immediate conclusion to Janelle that she and Maya would not be going at a minimum, and it was heartbreaking for her. It was something she was really looking forward to. So then the question became one of whether we leave Janelle and Maya behind and the boys and I give things a go, or if we scuttle the entire trip and see what we can do about getting our money back.
Neither option felt particularly good — but we erred on the side of the boys. We’d go for it. I took them to Yosemite without Janelle when she was pretty pregnant with Maya and while I remember the trip as a stress nightmare, it’s a trip Matthew talks about fondly all the time (he clearly does not recall my needing to march him through a parking lot being held upside-down by his ankles because he wouldn’t stop hitting me). The trip had been discussed extensively with the boys and one of the main reasons we planned it in the first place was as a special thing for Matthew. Canceling it all because his baby sister is sick felt like the epitome of the dilemma of the middle child.
A very sad Janelle dropped off me and the boys at the airport and I did my best to juggle three personal carry-ons, a large suitcase and two car booster seats into the airport. And you know, it started off great. Ticketing was easy. Security was light. Hanging by the gate worked out just fine. Matthew was excited to watch airplanes take off. The boys read with me and didn’t whine about being told they had to wait to be on the plane to do their iPads. The flight itself was uneventful and fast. Getting through SFO was no problem. The boys had fun getting to be the ones that chose the rental minivan we used. Matthew got to sit in his new booster-style seat for the first time. The boys laughed and laughed at the street names that the Google Maps voice spoke aloud to me on the way to the hotel because why not everything is funny when you’re a kid. The hotel room was nice. There was an In’N’Out and a Krispy Kreme literally like 200 feet from the hotel. Lego Batman was showing on HBO when we got back to the room. It was the trip we wanted it to be.
Then Sunday morning Joshua pulled the same fever Maya had the day before, and everything changed.
Immediately all plans were nixed. Just about everything we had planned involved walking around San Francisco, and you’re not going to take a kid rocking a fever to go long distances along a cold waterfront. We sat in the hotel room and watched just a totally unreasonable amount of Teen Titans Go on Cartoon Network.
While the boys veg’d out (oh, did I mention the hotel’s wi-fi was down while we were there? Icing on the cake) I texted with Janelle who was herself dealing with a sick and exceedingly needy toddler and tried to come up with a new gameplan. It was Sunday and we were not slated to return home until Wednesday night and that just didn’t seem plausible.
In between cartoon wackiness, I paid a stupid amount of additional money to change my Southwest fare, got the second hotel to agree to refund our now-canceled reservation and found an urgent care that could see Joshua right away. After the urgent care trip (which was shockingly efficient), I was given a prescription for Joshua in case it was flu (Ron Howard Narrator: It wasn’t) and then I trekked a couple blocks over with the boys to a Walgreens to grab the prescription. Wonder of wonders, when I approached the pharmacy counter, they already had the meds ready and waiting for us. It was a pretty great trip, not counting the part where Matthew lost the tag blanket he had brought along with him to the wind and then, like the little suicide machine that all little children are, sprinted into the street to grab it as I, Joshua literally piggy-backed on me, attempted to yank him back to the sidewalk before any cars got near to him.
Once that was done things were “simple”. The rest was just waiting it out. We had handled transportation, the money lost on the airfare was more or less a wash with the refunded hotel fee and the money we’d get back for the shorter car rental. Now I just had to deal with having Matthew, Lord of Rambunctiousness, stuck in a hotel room for about 12 hours.
Our flight home on Monday was in the evening, so we did the originally planned Jelly Belly run in the middle of the day. Joshua was fine through most of the morning — but once we had walked around Jelly Belly for awhile, he went downhill fast. Once again things turned into a race to get done enough to make Matthew happy while trying to keep Joshua from falling apart where he was standing. I would not call it a satisfying visit, but Matthew got to buy a bunch of jelly beans and I think he’d probably call it a win.
Once the Jelly Belly visit was done, it was just a drive to the airport and then waiting for our plane (which was, of course, delayed). Joshua laid down on whatever surface he could manage and was miserable, and then was miserable on the plane, reaching peak misery on descent into San Diego as the pressure change did not go well for him.
Joshua and Maya both were down for the count for the rest of the week, reenforcing that we made the right call cutting the trip short and not simply hoping it was a 24-hour bug.
I don’t know that there’s much of a lesson I learned from this. It certainly has the aura of a “All your fears will come true” kind of a moral to it. Perhaps more than that, though, I realized that any trip or outing isn’t what you planned it to be, it’s what you make it. This was absolutely not the trip I had wanted. But, the boys and I had a good time watching cartoons, Matthew had his first plane ride and I learned that I can adapt on the fly pretty well without totally melting down. In fact, the only time I lost my cool was when we were already home and I was unpacking bags after getting the boys down to bed. There was a moment where I thought that, after everything, I had forgotten Joshua’s most-loved stuffed animal at the hotel room. Just a few minutes later I had a flash and recalled where I had moved him to in our packing and, after I passed him along to Janelle to return to Joshua, I had to take a few moments to just sit on the stairs and cry a bit because that would have been too much.
I got them there safe, I got them home safe, I didn’t forget any stuff and I pulled off some advance level solo parenting. I’ll just try to focus on that.
Leave a Reply