Tag Archives: Family

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Ugh, vacation?

As much as I love getting away and seeing new places, sometimes the planning and preparation is so much work that it seems easier to stay home.

For me, anyway, because my best estimate is that in my family, about 90% of the planning and packing seems to fall on my shoulders.  And that’s for several reasons:

1. How many pairs of socks does an adult male need for a week’s vacation?  According to my husband, two.  Or however many pairs are clean when he starts packing because he actually remembered to put them into the laundry.

2. Where is the kids’ travel kit with their toothbrushes and whatever else they’d need on the road?  I doubt I’d think to ask Dave that question, because I’m not sure he knows that it even exists, despite the fact that he’s had to have seen this black bag on hotel room bathroom counters for at least the last five years.

3. What do we need to pack for a beach vacation with the kids?  My answer: swimsuits, goggles, frisbee, football, sunscreen, baby powder (to get the sand off their feet), flip-flops, towels, beach blanket and umbrella.  Dave’s answer: a beach chair that’s good for naps, and a book, right??

Now, in Dave’s defense, he generally works a lot more hours than I do. which means two things – 1. He is in a greater need for a restful break than I am, and 2. More of the child care responsibilities fall to me because I’m with them more (so I have a better idea of where their stuff is.  Or, in some cases, that it even exists).

It is getting easier as the kids get older and are more self-sufficient.  Vacation feels more like vacation, and less like I’m just cleaning up after them in a different place with a pool.

license plates

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HOW late is it??!

I like to think I’m fun to be around.  But really only until about 9:00 p.m.

Tonight, we went out to dinner with some new friends – a few families with their kids.  We finished at the restaurant around 8:00, and everyone else went back to one house so the kids could play and the adults could hang out.  We, on the other hand, came home so we could get a tired 8-year-old to bed at a reasonable time, to do our best to not start off the weekend with a sleep deficit.

sleeping

This is really nothing new for me, or my family.  In college, I was one of the few people I knew who could actually manage an 8:00 a.m. class (mostly because by 11:00, I’d be knocking on my neighbor’s dorm room door, asking her to turn down her music).  Back then, on most Sunday mornings, no matter how late I’d been out on Saturday, I’d be up by 9:00, doing laundry and hoping that someone else would wake up so I’d have somebody to accompany me to the dining hall for brunch before I crumpled in a heap on the laundry room floor.

With a few late-night exceptions, my life has continued along happily this way.  I was able to find myself a great guy who also doesn’t love late nights (When we celebrated our 15th anniversary last year, a friend chalked the success of our marriage up to the fact that we are both often asleep by 10:00).  And I guess some of this is genetic, because our kids are just like us.  When Matthew was a baby, we tried our best to keep him on what I think now was a pretty complicated sleep schedule, because if we veered off course by more than about 30 minutes in either direction, it could get ugly.  Switching the clocks for daylight savings time was a nightmare.  Both kids have gotten a lot more flexible as they’ve gotten older, but usually, we all would still would rather go to bed early.

As I’ve grown into adulthood, I’ve realized that I just came this way, and that’s okay with me; I consider it part of my charm.  I can take the jokes from friends and have learned to laugh at myself.  But please don’t call me after 9.

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This will just take a minute.

English: Logo for The Home Depot. Category:Bra...

English: Logo for The Home Depot. Category:Brands of the World (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Whenever my husband Dave decides he’s going to fix or improve something around the house, he surveys the problem and tell me it’s going to “just take a minute.”

It’s never a minute, and for some reason, after 15 years of home ownership, he still just doesn’t get it.  How come I do?

I’ve done the math.  Any project is a minimum of three hours and two trips to Home Depot (please note here my use of the word MINIMUM).  The maximum is a full day, four Home Depot trips, one Lowe’s visit, and a drive to the emergency room for stitches.

I shouldn’t complain, because on some level, I am glad that Dave wants to try to fix things himself.  But last year, he wanted to change a toilet seat.  Relatively easy job, right?  Not when the screws holding the old one aren’t coming off.  Rather than try some WD-40, Dave thought it would be a good idea to try and loosen the screws himself.  With a hammer.  I warned him, and yet somehow he was still surprised when he smashed a hole in the toilet.

I do think that different people just have different skills.  Dave can make a mean lasagna (his “secret” is double meat.  Now you know.), can shoot a basketball like nobody’s business, and our grass is beautiful.  The toilet?  Not so much.

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You should really do this yourself.

I had one of those conversations with my kids this evening that makes me question what kind of job I’m doing as a mom.

I’ll be honest.  I don’t have those moments every day.  Generally, I think that we are doing a pretty good job of raising good, polite, responsible kids.  Tonight, though, the boys conspired to head downstairs just as I was putting the finishing touches on dinner.  I asked them to come back, and when they looked confused by my request, I told them that “I’m not a waitress, and it’s not my job to serve you.”  One actually replied, “But it is.  You’re the mom.”

I’m embarrassed to even admit that this conversation went down in my house.  And it makes me think that we need to do a better job of teaching our kids to take care of themselves.  I’m also hesitant to admit that on some level, not only do I not mind taking of care of my kids, but I actually kind of like it.  There is something that makes me feel wonderfully “mommy-like” by cooking dinner, making school lunches, baking banana bread (with bananas that I have, un-mommy-like, allowed to rot on the counter), and folding little miniature boxer briefs.

But I know there’s a really fine line here, and I fear that I’ve firmly planted myself on the wrong side of it.  My 8-year-old can’t reach where we keep the milk in the fridge, so I pour it for him.  My 11-year-old, on the other hand, is a handful of inches shorter than me, and can certainly reach it.  But he’s convinced he’ll spill it everywhere (which, incidentally, he most likely will), so he almost always asks me to pour it for him.  I’m sure this is a life skill I should be teaching him, and I wonder how his adult life will turn out if he can’t pour his own milk.

Maybe tomorrow morning, I’ll let him do it himself.  Then again, I just went food shopping today, and I’m not entirely certain that I want a whole gallon of milk on the floor.

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