Planning for the annual Spring Break holiday for school age children has become one of the more stressful challenges of competitive parenting—not up there quite as paramount as the homemade Halloween costume choice, but stressful and challenging nonetheless. If you are a working parent, you have an automatic out—must work, so will plan on sending the kids to an extremely expensive sports, art, music, or science camp to keep the kids occupied while you pursue your selfish right to have a life outside your children. For other families, this can be a great opportunity for family bonding over costly vacations to Disneyworld or Park City, Utah. While you want to balance the desire to over-indulge your youngster with the escalation of the creative vacation wars, you also don’t want them to return to school with a response to the question “So what did YOU do for Spring Break” with “I mostly hung around and watched some TV.” That would be unimaginative and inexcusable.
Today I made the 70-mile trip with my family from Austin to the San Antonio Zoo in celebration of both Spring Break (for my two older children—we call them “the big ones”) and my younger daughter’s third birthday. It wasn’t exactly a Clark Griswald’esque Vacation scenario but it then it wasn’t a Hallmark made-for-television movie either. Four children, two over-caffeinated parents in a minivan that doubles as a monkey cage and a DVD player showing Thomas the Tank Engine over and over and over again can make for a long ride, even though we were only in the car for a little over two hours. A non-starter potty stop (for my three-year-old) in San Marcus and numerous squabbles from the far back confines of the van left me and my husband exhausted before we got to our final destination.
We do have a few rules of the road for traveling in Mom’s car: seatbelts worn at all times—even if the car is in park as Mommy gets her fix at the Starbucks drive-thru, Danielle (my nine-year-old) may NOT remove her shoes under any circumstances, and no fighting. Pretty simple rules, right? I even let my kids eat in my car—there is a four inch layer of pretzels, squished goldfish crackers, sand, and apple juice congealed on the floor of my car to deem the resale value nonexistent. And it’s a Honda.
Regarding the no fighting rule, growing up, I never understood why my parents would become so unreasonably infuriated with my siblings and I and our backseat shenanigans. Now I know. How can my children—these precious, innocent gifts from God that all rented space at one time in my womb—go after each other with such malicious intent in open warfare to do each other psychological and bodily harm? All in a 70-mile happy family trip to see elephants and zebras?????
We finally made it to the zoo and had a great Kodak moment of riding the miniature train around the park and zoo grounds. My husband even took a photo of me with the kids looking happy and carefree. I am usually never in the photos—as official family photographer, I am outside looking in on years of family photo albums. The good part is, I never seem to age!
After we finally made it inside the zoo, my oldest decided to mope around all day because I refused to buy her more junk from the gift shop. My three-year-old, the birthday girl, took a header out of the back of the wagon, resulting in an enormous goose egg on the back of her skull. My 22-month old terrorized the goats in the petting zoo by alternately pinching their tails or beating them with the hair brushes that the zoo personnel handed out to the children so they could gently groom the animals. And a bird pooped in my freshly shampooed hair as we ate our picnic lunch under the shade of the oak trees.
