Vacation Days can lead to Vacation Daze

It’s Wednesday of school vacation week or Thursday, depending on when you get your paper.  Have you pulled your hair out yet?  I’ve still got a little bit left which is really just a credit to the volume of hair that I started with this week.

As much as I enjoy spending time with my children, February vacation tends to be the one that sends me over the edge.  First of all, it comes just seven weeks after the end of Christmas vacation.  Sprinkled throughout those seven weeks we’ve had a few early dismissals and a four-day weekend in honor of Martin Luther King. 

February vacation is also a rough one because several of my friends are either heading north or west to ski country, or south to a tropical destination.  I too decided to take my kids south for a few days, but we only travel as far as my parent’s home in New Jersey, so there isn’t much opportunity for sun bathing, swimming with dolphins or drinks with little paper umbrellas in them.

I foolishly chose to add a day to my kids’ vacation by taking them out of school a day early for travel.  Wanting to maximize my time with my family, I opted to travel on Friday and return on Tuesday.  Setting the tone for my trip was the discovery that my husband’s car needed several hundred dollars worth of repairs in order to insure safe travel.  This news came on the heels of having spent another ungodly sum on my own car, which required a rebuilt transmission and still sports a “check engine” light when traveling over 60mph.  I began to wonder if someone was trying to send me a message: “Stay home!”

Still, I decided to take my chances, loading my kids in the car and heading south.  Mere minutes into my trip I discovered that my iPod had died.  Disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to listen to my favorite music for the six-hour trip, I consoled myself with satellite radio instead.  Thankfully, my husband’s car behaved, my kids immersed themselves in videos in the back seat, and we arrived in the Garden State just in time to see whether or not the flags were really lowered to half-staff for Whitney Houston.

Our first morning in New Jersey, my sons and I spent several hours poking around a favorite flea market with my sister, brother-in-law and nephew. Buried deep in an old milk crate, I found old record albums from the original PBS shows “Zoom” and “The Electric Company” which I purchased $2 apiece. Within minutes a stranger approached and said, “I’ll give you $5 for that Zoom album...I’ll give you $10!” Tempting…but no.  I held onto those vinyl treasures.  My second best score of the day was an antique Royal typewriter, which I thought would make a great decoration.  Relaxing with my sisters later that same day, my sons and their cousins took turns typing away, setting aside their Nintendo game systems and other electronic devices to play with what they deemed “historic technology.”  Hmm.  I wonder if I can convince them that the vacuum cleaner is “historic technology” as well.

Our second day in New Jersey, I discovered that nothing can wake you from a sound sleep faster than your child yelling, “Mom…the toilet is overflowing!”  Truth be told, it was at that point I missed my husband most.  How wise of him to stay in Hanover, sleeping late while I unclogged a toilet before my first sip of coffee.  If ever I needed one of those little umbrella drinks, it was then.

Later that same day, my sister and I took my boys to a local museum to see a special Lego exhibit, then stopped by my grandparents’ grave to pay our respects.  Not one to pass up a chance to scare his brother, my older son tried to recreate the cemetery scene from “Night of the Living Dead”.   I quickly hustled the kids out of the graveyard before we got ourselves kicked out.

Ok, so it may not be a ski vacation or a tropical retreat, but at least I’m spending time with my kids.  We’re scheduled to head home on Tuesday and decompress on Wednesday.  And then on Thursday my real vacation will begin when I go back to work while my husband takes a few days off to spend with the boys. 

Because honestly…why should I have all the fun?