Vacation's All I Ever Wanted

The thing with taking a week long vacation is that it is always over way too soon.  It starts with such promise.  You leave work on Friday knowing that you won't have to come back until the following weekend.  There is something very freeing about it.  It's the last hope for non-teachers and non-students.  We normal people don't get spring breaks or summers off (How do we live like this?), so us working stiffs have very little else to look forward to in the time off department.

Here is my secret shame: I didn't always appreciate vacations.  I know that it seems odd and counter-intuitive, but there was a time in my life when vacations and time off wasn't a priority to me.  It started early on when I had perfect attendance throughout elementary school.  Seriously.  I didn't miss a day of school for 6 straight years.    When I was in college, my "vacation" was the time when I could work full time instead of working a ton of hours AND going to school.  It was a break because I only had to worry about the 9 to 5 for a few months.  I was addicted to work and hated missing time.

Luckily I've since been cured of that particular illness.

And this week was something I had been looking forward to all year.  I got an entire week with my wife and my girls.  That is like concentrated awesome.  Grace and Ana all day long is a big deal when I often don't get to see them outside of the two hours before bedtime each night and the weekends.  A vacation means I'm there in the mornings (when they are at their cutest) in a real pile on the big bed.  I got to watch them eat Cheerios and banana for breakfast and chicken and cantaloupe for lunch.  I got to roll on the floor with them which is normally an activity that only happens on the weekends.

Vacation also meant expanding on our normal activities and experiences.

We spent time at the pool and had lots of fun splashing.

We took the girls on hikes in the backpacks.

We took the girls out on Donner Lake on the boat for the first time.

Erin and I went kayaking because we had her parents to watch the girls.

We played a lot of Farkle (something my father-in-law got way into).

We got to eat at a place featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (Jax at the Tracks) where everyone loved the girls.

We went rafting with friends.

 

We even had an experience of Ana being a kleptomaniac.  But we'll get into that later.

You look back at a vacation like that and you wonder where the time went.  You can't believe that a week can go by so fast.  But it does when you are doing things that you love.  Nobody complains about a vacation being too long was unless they had a horrible time.  This was not the case.  It was what a vacation should be all about: spending time with people you love, doing things that you like, eating great food, drinking great wine and beer (or even adequate wine and beer), going to bed whenever you like, sleeping in until whenever your wife or babies let you and just enjoying yourself.

Good times.  Now back to the grind.