Vacations are great. Once you get there and all the preparing, researching, booking flights, finding accommodation, renting cars, packing, schlepping, cleaning, traveling, and organizing are over. And you’ve gotten over the jetlag and general fatigue of travel. And recovered from the stress of getting ready for this trip. Vacations are not for the faint hearted! Have you ever found yourself manically productive the day or week before you leave for vacation? I am acutely and chronically afflicted by manic pre-vacation productivity syndrome. I run around sorting out closets that have long been ignored, cleaning the fridge, organizing  the children’s clothes and suddenly finding it terribly urgent to get everything that doesn’t fit properly out of their drawers, devising new ways to store toys, throwing out artwork and ‘creations’ that have been littering the kitchen table for weeks or months, returning phone calls, scheduling check ups, canceling appointments, arranging plant waterers, buying swimsuits and hats and sunscreen… This manic productivity can be wonderful but it is yet another way that I stress myself out about going on vacation.

So finally you arrive and get settled and have some fun. That is IF you don’t put too much pressure on yourself, your spouse, and your children to make the most of the precious time together and the beauty of the place and the opportunities to do new things and the kindness of your host and the great restaurants and the weather… Sometimes I make myself and those around me totally crazy trying too hard to have a good time. It can be exhausting. And stressful. And rather ridiculous.

But if I can let go of my expectations of a perfect week together, we usually do have fun. In spite of ourselves! You’d think I would have learnt my lesson by now, but I keep getting wrapped up in the visions in my mind – visions in which the four of us play together and adventure together and cook together and everyone sleeps peacefully at the end of a busy fun-filled day…  But the reality is that I have two demanding kids with different needs and abilities, a husband who has his own plans for the holiday (and occasional unpredictable work demands), and often friends or family to consider as well, not to mention my own need for a break! None of the things I am imagining happen in real life, so why would they happen when we are away from home?!

What makes vacations special is also what makes them hard – we all have lots of time on our hands, each of us have different aspirations, we find ourselves in new and unfamiliar places (and for some reason often uncomfortable beds), we have no daily routines or rhythms to guide us. We are free! It is exhilarating and terrifying. We have to make our plans day by day, getting into a new rhythm where schedules don’t matter and where we work as a team. This notion of being a team is one of our big challenges right now, since 2 year olds can’t ski all day, 6 year olds can’t sit still, and dads who work too hard like to play too hard, while tired moms just want to go to the spa… So there is a lot of negotiating to be done on holiday. And a lot of talking about plans at night, only to find the weather next morning won’t allow that picnic or the little one is tired and cranky and won’t get dressed, much less go hiking.

We haven’t quite figured out a ‘vacation formula’ that works for our family. Is it beach or mountains, near or far, many people or few, long or short, busy or quiet, planned or spontaneous…? And of course when we do figure out the formula, it will be irrelevant, because everything will have changed yet again. So we just muddle along, having some great days, and some horrid days, traveling to some old favorite spots and venturing to some new ones. Somehow we find the courage to keep traveling. In spite of all the work of making family holidays happen, I am happy we get to share new places and new adventures as a family. I love that we keep adding to our stories and memories. I think it does us all good, even if it doesn’t go quite the way any of us imagined or hoped or planned it would. Along the way we’ve learned a lot, seen a lot, grown a lot (in many ways), talked a lot, made friends, taken photos – both beautiful and silly, cried, laughed, explored, napped, read, played, and opened our minds… It could certainly be worse.