Let’s get one thing cleared up. When you take your offspring somewhere for more than a couple days, it is not a “vacation”.
According to www.dictionary.com, a vacation is an extended period of leisure and recreation, especially one spent away from home or in traveling. The action of leaving something one previously occupied.
When traveling with children, you are neither leisuring nor leaving something you previously occupied. IT ALL GOES WITH YOU.
And then some.
You still have to feed them, clean them, suction their snot, wipe their butts, schlep all 37 pounds of their gear on your back like the sad, old donkey you are, find toilets every 10 minutes, responsibly return to childcare providers when they inform you your progeny is feverish and then proceed to take them to the ship’s infirmary. (Never in my damn life did I expect to visit a hospital on a nautical vessel. Thank you, Mr. Hayden Abernathy and the mysterious Carnival Rash.)
Not to mention, you do all these things in a hot, confined area with no exhaust or cleaning supplies or personal laundry room, never enough clothes, no regular schedule or naps, and finally, strange food, 99% of which is predominantly constructed from sugar molecules, trans fats and food dye.
You will likely experience extra tantrums (from adults and children), spitting, slapping, projectile vomiting, either too much poop or not enough poop, either of which presents major issues to all involved and a majority of the time, you’ll be rolling around in a stupor like a drunken blueberry because you, yourself shoveled in way too much nasty, delicious vacation food. You may even throw a grown-up temper tantrum.
Just ask me how I know.
Let’s just call it a “trip”.
Because I most definitely “trip” every time we go on a family “vacation”. Inevitably, on the first night, my husband and I will collapse into bed, tears of bitter rage and regret coursing down our faces, rhetorically and accusatorily questioning one another regarding our sanity, parenting choices and gluttony for punishment.
“Why did we do this? What were we thinking? Our expectations, although considerably lower than last year, are still emphatically too high. How? Why? Can we even have sex on family “vacation”?”
Cue sleeping pills and prayers for patience to let the twins and our devil of a 6 year old live out another day of the “trip”.
You could be thinking this phenomenon is a gift contained in a pretty little package and bestowed upon large families or stupid people who aren’t prepared.
But you would be wrong. Because our 11 suitcases and 10 other random satchels say so. There is no way to prepare for this bedlam.
It is a special treat reserved for any person who has reproduced and stuck around for the after party. Any number of spawn will do. They all suck, no matter how many of them there are. They will all act up no matter how old they are and regardless of whether there is one or a whole army of them.
They will fight, they will steal each other’s swimsuits and shorts and they will wail and biotch slap each other to get into the one, minuscule bathroom.
They don’t care how much money or time you spent on this “trip”. They are monsters disguised in Turtle trunks and Puddle Jumpers and giant sunglasses with bootie shorts.*
*I do need to disclaim here that the female humans aged 10 and up were mostly docile and well-behaved on this “vacation”.
Now I’m going to share with you a little platter of Abernathy Vacation hors d’oeuvres.
1. What happens when 11 people go to a cruise ship restaurant and grossly overeat? 11 emergency trips to the freakishly loud cruise ship commodes, that’s what. The problem is, there were only three bathrooms. There was a lot of seizing and crying and intestinal gurgling. We were also on a time schedule. We successfully toileted 4 adults and 7 children in 21 minutes with no accidents. It was a victorious moment for all involved. It also smelled like the tubes of London in 1848 for the length of at least 7 staterooms.
2. Even 6 year old Harleigh remarked, “There is no courtesy flush on a cruise toilet.” She was totally correct. Unless you want your butt sucked off and jetted into the ocean along with your doody.
3. At one point, we ordered some room service sammies and chippies to tame the underage masses and changed into swimsuits whilst we waited. There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth (and the kids were pretty fussy, too) and upon knocking and entering, the soft-spoken Filipino man smiled broadly and declared, “How’s the party?!” I was crying, most of the kids were either screaming or laughing deliriously and Dave was grimacing quietly, as he tends to do. Party, indeed.
4. Hands down, my best day at sea was sneaking onto the second floor “Family Harbor” staterooms and inadvertently discovering that they had free laundry. 7 loads later, I was in a good place. Real good.
5. Two children placed Cadbury Caramel eggs in their backpacks. In the Caribbean heat. On the beach. The end.
6. You know how they check your bags when entering or leaving foreign countries to make sure you’re not carrying illegal mangoes or rocks or Mad Cow Disease or whatever? Yeah. My kids stole from every country we went to. Upon arriving home and helping them unpack, I found shells, rocks, leaves, flowers and coconuts. Apparently they neglected to alert me of their international smuggling so I’d be able to exercise plausible deniability when conversing with border patrol.
7. Worn out after a long day swimming in Mexico, I asked a clerk in the eco park where we’d just spent hundreds upon hundreds of dollars, for a plastic shopping bag in which to place our wet swimsuits. She looked me dead in the eyes and said sweetly, “No.” I asked again, sure she’d misunderstood. She glanced at the huge stack of cheap shopping sacks behind her and repeated, “No.”. Let’s just say I may or may not have stomped out of the store, dumped a trash can directly on the concrete sidewalk in her line of sight, and taken the trash bag for my swimsuits. Not one person dared question me as to why I’d do such a horrible thing. I think the look on my face said it all. You mess with a mom of a ton of grouchy kids in wet, smelly swimsuits and she will cut.you.up.
8. I once woke up at 4am on “vacation” to assist my precious offspring in crossing an item off their life bucket lists – swimming in the ocean with horses. After a carefully choreographed dance of breakfast, pooping and packing backpacks for 8 people, the loudspeaker crackled to life and informed me the wind was too fierce to dock in Honduras. I was not a happy cruiser. Instead, I spent the day in my stateroom with two angry honey badgers, one of which was sick with a mysterious rash and fever.
9. The next day, we made a consolatory stop in Cozumel. We went to a beach called Paradise and indeed, it was. Paradise had a thing called a “water playground”. It’s like giant blow-up icebergs and trampolines floating in the ocean where adults can forget how old and weak their upper body is and proceed to bruise, tear and otherwise inflict unnecessary pain upon themselves in order to impress their children or each other. I’ve never seen so many couples with their butts smashed in each other’s faces as they attempted to push, pull and drag one another to the tip of the iceberg. Just to prove a point. We’re not old and weak. We’re not.
10. Then there are these tiny, fleeting moments that make it all worth it and likely the reason why we parental units forget the pain and torture and plan another “trip” again and again and again. I think it’s maybe a little like childbirth. Perhaps we emit some kind of hormone that clouds our vision and makes our memories of the horror just a little murky. It’s a biological failsafe put in place to make sure we don’t drop them all off at a Mexican gas station and call it good.
11. Like the time the kids were nearly weeping with joy as they rode gloriously on the tip of a dolphin’s nose or pet a giant stingray. Or the time a twin tasted a virgin piña colada for the first time or dug into a Carnival chocolate melting cake with an extra large spoon. It’s the way their eyes bulge when they find out there’s 24 hour ice cream cones or learn that there’s this fish that cleans the coral reef and as a result, poops out 75% of the Caribbean’s white sand or when they illicitly pirate a tiny, adorable baby coconut into their backpack to keep forever to remember their first cruise. (And maybe their last)
12. It’s those times when they gaze into your eyes and say, “Thank you. This was so awesome,” when you might find yourself vacation shopping on the drive home to see which continent you can sail to in order to inflict agony upon yourself next year. Or not. Idk.
