On Vacation
Somewhere around your child being 4 months old you start to get cocky. You’ve spent the last month or so getting into a real routine – work/daycare, bedtime, Saturday lunches out. . .all of it now falls under Ain’t No Thang. And that’s great. Except then you start to get ideas. Ideas like “I bet he could handle lunch and Target.” What you don’t realize is these are the gateway ideas to the mack daddy of ideas: “We could totally take a 6 month old on vacation.”
You run the idea past your mom who agrees it’s doable (she may be lying – it’s hard to tell). You run the idea past friends, co-workers, and random street people and get mixed reviews. You tell yourself the people who think you’re crazy are the real crazy ones. I mean, he can handle lunch and Target back to back; how much harder can an entire week packed full of activities and sleeping in the pack and play in the same hotel room be?
And so you find yourself playing Tetris as you cram half of your household belongings in the back of your car, lowering your expectations to middle Earth, and hitting the road. You believe yourself to be doomed the first night as you realize you forgot 90% of the bottled water for bottles at home and the one gallon you did remember plummets from the luggage cart teaching you that plastic does, in fact, crack. But miracle of miracles, it’s not an omen so much as the worst thing to happen on the trip.
Does it turn out to be like the vacations of yore filled with late mornings, local restaurants, and no real plan? Absolutely not. But a vacation filled with little to no sleep as you learn just how important bedtime is for a tiny human, dinner from the hotel lobby, and park bench diaper changes (no, that wasn’t us outside the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. . .yes, yes it was) is more of an adventure anyway. And more importantly, it gives you the confidence to say, “ I do not care; I will take my child anywhere.” Maybe we should look into Europe for next year. . . .
Soybeans, Too 
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