So now that I am returned from vacation, I look back on the week my family just spent at the beach and try to take stock of the experience and find myself comparing what actually happened to a mental inventory I wasn’t necessarily consciously aware I was carrying around in my skull. Old habits die hard. I am both bemused and pleased to report that I think by any measure the vacation should be classified as a success:
- I wanted to do some reading at the beach, and I read one novel and one trade paperback of comics, both begun after arriving and consumed cover-to-cover before departing.
- I wanted to watch at least one movie, and I did, on a lazy afternoon when both my wife and son were napping and I had the opportunity to throw a Netflix disc in the DVD player.
- I wanted to catch some serious rays, and I got in at least a little bit of lizard time more or less every day. More importantly, I managed this without getting seriously sunburnt, which never used to happen when I was a kid but seems harder to avoid now. Quite possibly this means I am finally learning the new proper approach to sun-worship to take now that I am no longer an outdoor-playing child but a Big Gray-enshrouded cubicle denizen.
- I wanted to eat well with no regard for any concerns except those of purest hedonism, and this item might be the one with the most emphatic checkmarks beside it. Every day included three big meals, as well as happy-hour snacking and post-dinner dessert more often than not. Steaks of both cow and swordfish origin were consumed, as were lobster tails and shrimp and pizza and cold sesame noodles and, by me in their entirety, a full box of Reese’s Puffs cereal and a whole package of Cookies-n-Cream Pop Tarts.
- Mostly I just wanted to spend some relaxing and enjoyable time with my family, and that may be something hard to quantify but I feel certain that I managed it.
Of course my ambitions on the various pop culture fronts outstripped my actual accomplishments. In a fit of incredible optimism (no doubt engendered at least in part by the fact that it had been years since the last time I got to spend a week at the beach) I had actually packed all the Netflix movies in the house and several other DVDs I’m currently borrowing or have been meaning to re-watch, and I brought three novels of equal beach-read-worthiness, and toted my laptop along with vague notions of blogging vacation dispatches or just doodling on some fiction ideas I’ve been having and obviously, since I’ve already delineated what I did do, most of those things fall into the didn’t-do column. But really, that’s all right. I was never bored, because entertainment was always at hand, and I never let myself feel overwhelmed by how much I could be doing but wasn’t doing. I just vacationed.
And as far as my concerns about what a vacation really amounts to when it involves a two-year-old, the only post-trip conclusion I have drawn is that it simply makes the days go by faster. Which only stands to reason, I suppose, given the way that a two-year-old’s life is structured (our two-year-old’s, at least). We would get up in the morning around 6:30 and have a leisurely breakfast, then transition to readying for beach time by changing into swimsuits and judiciously applying sunscreen to ourselves (the little guy usually being fairly cooperative in this endeavor), then hit the beach by about 10 and stay for as long as the little guy cared to (generally no more than an hour) and then pack up and head back to the house in time for lunch, followed by two or three hours of nap, followed by an hour or so at the house’s pool or just hanging around indoors, followed by happy hour and dinner prep and the toddler-dinner-bedtime routine, and sometimes the grown-ups would eat with the little guy and sometimes not until after he went to bed. Then, with full bellies and fifteen hours of up-time, 9:30 looked like a pretty good time to think about heading to bed, and 10:30 looked like the absolute terminus of consciousness by any rational measure. We made time for a latenight dip in the pool here and a moonlit walk to the beach there (which was envisioned as a moonlit walk ON the beach until we got there and realized that, if we venture far from the entrance stairs in the dark, we might never find our way back – next time we’ll bring glowsticks to hang off the railing of “our” stairs) but for the most part the nights were as low-key as they come, coming to a close quickly and making way for a whole new day in the same mold as the last. And seven days can fly by in that fashion.
But that’s not a bad thing, considering. A week minding a two-year-old where every day seemed to pass ever-so-slowly would probably be a far sight worse. The little guy really was very good, even for the five or six hours each way he had to be strapped into his car seat. While we were at our actual destination, though, he was in heaven. He loved the pool and he loved the ocean. He loved asking me to build sand castles that he could proceed to stomp to oblivion. He loved flying a kite one afternoon, going to the aquarium to see otters and turtles and seahorses and sharks one morning. He loved seeing his grandparents every day for a week. He loved playing with new-to-him secondhand toys and reading new-to-him secondhand books. (In point of fact, he loved the Golden Book truncated version of Lady and the Tramp so much and demanded so many readings that by the end of the week he had it half-memorized and could accurately finish every sentence if I began it for him.) And, superfluous as it may seem to say it, I love watching him loving stuff.
So, nothing extremely earth-shattering. I’m pretty well sold now on this new idea of family vacations with my family in which I am one of the parents rather than one of the kids, despite my earlier trepidations. But, really, it was probably a foregone conclusion that I’d get there.
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