Parents of young children know that vacation rarely feels like a vacation. So then why do we do it? Is it because we forget how hard it was the last time we attempted it? Is it because we want them to have treasured memories of family vacations like we remember from our own childhoods? (Yikes, was it this hard for our parents back then too?) Is it because we want to get the kids out of their comfort zone and allow them to learn from the experience and value nature, adventure, culture, tradition, and so on? Of course it’s all of that, and because of all of that, it always feels worth it (even when it all leaves us feeling exhausted and somehow more appreciative of our home than when we left it.)
A couple of weeks ago, we took a week long trip to Jamaica. This was huge for our family, being our first international trip with four young kids.
It was the first time the kids used passports…
Their first red-eye flight…
The first time the triplets slept together in one bed…
The first time Liam shared a room with a cousin…
…and the first time my entire extended family had been together since the triplets were just babies.
It was a family reunion of sorts, planned so graciously by my parents. We’d been looking forward to it for a year. Did it all go exactly as planned and as smoothly as one might have hoped? Of course not! To give you an idea, in addition to the expected behavioral outbursts, on Monday, Kaylee and Lily got stung by jellyfish, on Tuesday, Cecilia got pinkeye, and Liam had 24 hours of tummy troubles over Thursday/Friday.
So, we could have done without all of that, but we made the most of our trip in spite of it all, and that is an important lesson for our kids to learn about travel. Actually, it’s not the first time we’ve had this lesson in our family travels. Last year, Cecilia fractured her elbow just one day before we left for our trip to Hawaii. Any plan we had about spending all day everyday at the beach vanished, having a child in a cast who had to stay completely out of sand and water. So what did we do? We made the best of it. We altered our expectations and came up with back up plans. We made it work.
So when it came to all of our challenges in Jamaica, I’m proud to say that while it was rough at times, our kids were troopers overall. They rolled with the punches and came out of it all with experiences and memories we can only hope will last a lifetime for them.
For me, I’ll remember the snippets of peace I was able to allow myself to enjoy whenever I could, like floating on my back in the Caribbean sea, sipping on my daily pina colada, getting up early enough to do yoga with my husband before the kids woke up in the morning, and laughing with my siblings and parents over games after the kids went to bed at night.
Throughout the trip, I couldn’t help but see my siblings whose kids are older (and not triplets), and imagine enviously what vacation must be like for them. They could seemingly relax and enjoy their days without the challenges and stress that we experienced with our triplets on a daily basis. They looked like they were having a real vacation, and they could probably be sitting in their houses or at their jobs right now thinking, “Take me back!”
I’m not exactly feeling that, but I am feeling very lucky and incredibly hopeful. I’m lucky that I’m able to give my children these valuable life experiences through travel, and I’m hopeful that by giving them experience with different kinds of travel through the years, maybe someday we’ll get to experience something that actually feels like vacation with our family- the kind that’s never exactly what you’d expect, but is just the right mix of relaxation and adventure.
