Beasts of Unburden

Deanna and (especially) I are notorious vacation over packers. This is especially true when we hit the road in our supercool 10-year old Honda Odyssey. Why bring 4 pairs of shoes when you can bring 5 - we're driving, right? Sure the condo we are renting for vacation has a washer and dryer, but what if its broken - better bring the big suitcase. Swimsuits and winter coats - no problem, after all, who really knows what the weather will be.

 

Things only got worse after we bought a car rooftop pod - golf clubs, tennis rackets, balls, bats, baseball gloves, snorkeling equipment, a giant hammock with its surprisingly heavy "portable" collapsible frame - bring it on! Want to bring that surf board we bought on sale at Brookfield Zoo a few summers ago? Why of course we do boys, perhaps this is the year the Lake Michigan surf in Door County peaks above 6 inches! You'll have to sit with it across your laps though, the pod is filled up with sandcastle building equipment, you know, for the times when we are not busy surfing. There have been trips when I have had to actually unpack portions of the interior of the van during rest stops in order to extricate the kids from the third row seats; coolers, and bags spilling out of the side door onto the hot concrete. I have secretly toyed with the idea of buying a small trailer so we can haul even more stuff - why own a van with a trailer hitch if you aren't going to use it! Wouldn't it be awesome to bring all five bikes, I've thought to myself. If we brought them we wouldn't need to rent them, freeing s to actually then take two bike rides instead of one!

 

Things are no better when we fly. We borrow luggage scales and carefully weigh our suitcases, inevitably working our way down by removing luggage items until we are just under the allowed checked bag weights. We stuff oversized "carry" on bags into overhead racks. In fairness to Deanna, I am probably worse than her, as I, left to my own devices, have a penchant for changing clothes for different activities. In that respect I probably would have made a good Downton Abbey resident. The kids seem to have inherited our tendencies, spending their pre-vacation time cooking up elaborate schemes by which to smuggle as many toys and stuffed animals on the trip as they can get by us.

 

Anyway, that all changed last summer when the five of us, accompanied by several Sherpas, boarded a flight to the Pacific Northwest. On board was another family we knew from town, headed, like us, for a week-long trip. Except...not only were they traveling without Sherpas, each member of the family of four was traveling with a single backpack! And not the giant, I'm spending the next six months hiking Europe kind of backpack, but the normal kind of backpack. Confusion, astonishment, disbelief! "How?" we whispered to ourselves after, "were they able to do that?!?" They looked perfectly normal; smelled fine, good even; yet they were travelling with luggage that would barely contain the collection of travel books we were carting on the trip.

 

The sense of awe stuck with us, and during a recent long weekend trip, we aspired to do the same. Three nights in a hotel, five hour Amtrak trip, one backpack per family member, no other bags, no exceptions. And you know what, we pulled it off, despite temptation and the between season weather that was positively screaming for an array of clothing options. And it was, at least for me, freeing, exhilarating even! Showers, minimal sweating, clothing layers, no restaurants demanding much in the way of dressiness from us or the kids (not even the jeans my kids sadly seem to regard as "dress pants"), and we were all set. Turns out I can enjoy a trip even when I haven't brought my own sound machine, cappuccino-maker, monogrammed towels, flat-screen television, badminton set and canoe paddle! Interestingly, I noticed that most of those things were even available in St. Louis, where we visited, had I really decided I needed them.

 

Am I cured? Sadly, the answer is probably no. I'll be fighting the urge to over pack the next trip, and the next twenty after that. I am, however, hiking down the road to recovery, a backpack jauntily slung across my back and my arms swinging free!   

 

 

"Look Mom! No luggage!" Owen, with Hayden, Cooper and Deanna in the background, hits the road luggage-free.

 

Free Parenting Advice!

I thought I would start 2013 off with a bit of parenting advice.

 

"Wait a minute Red Planet," I hear you long-time readers saying. "Step back there Bucko. You've barely posted anything in the past year and then come riding in here on your high horse to give us parenting advice! Where the heck have you been and how do we even know you have the slightest notion how to parent anymore?"

 

Fair questions all. As to where I have been, well, uh, there was a move to a new house, billable hours, and, uh, something good on TV that one night. Anyway, I really don't have time for this. If you want to ignore my advice, do so at your own peril.

 

The advice, learned the hard way, is that when a six-year-old tells you he is feeling queasy at bedtime, don't put him to bed in the top bunk. 

 

Yep. There it is. Or was, pretty much everywhere. Big, nasty, three level mess. I've been through a lot a unpleasant things as a parent, including explosive poops that have blown out onesies and diapers in restaurants, amusement parks and other inconvenient locations, and having a one-year old hurl on my shoulder and down my back as I was holding him. But last night rivaled the worst of them. The oppressive smell, the splatter effect, and the sheer number of pillows (3), blankets/sheets (4), sleeping brothers (1), walls (2), floor (1), baseball cards (3), stuffed animals (1) and other miscellaneous objects that were collateral damage in this single incident was record-breaking.

 

I can hear you again, readers: "See, you don't know what the hell you're doing; you should have had a barf bucket up there!"

 

Ah, but we did. But despite that, and our late-arriving and urgently expressed parental encouragement to "Use the Bucket!!!," it was all white noise to a disoriented and half-asleep kid in the middle of a monumental hurl.

 

The one blessing to be found in this season of sick is that the kids seem to hew more towards my wife's family's "one and done" style of dealing with a stomach-emptying virus, as opposed to my family's "repeat retch" style. More representative of my family's style is a diary entry made in 1976 by my 9-year-old self where I dutifully recorded down to the minute the 8 times that I threw up in an 11-hour overnight period (you can see that "write what you know" has always been my driving philosophy as an author).  

 

And so it goes. And while there is no denying parenthood is pretty awesome and full of wonderful, rewarding experiences, I can safely say, having now been there, that scrubbing puke off of walls and sleeping children in the middle of the night is not one of them. Keep those sick kids at floor level!

The Words Less Spoken

Successful parenting, as "they" say, is 8% patience, 22% common sense, 14% genetic roulette, 13% yelling, 18% luck, 6% tolerance for foul substances and sleep deprivation, 3% television, 8% wise and memorable parental-style nuggets of advice, and 18% what you don't say. The same formula applies to marriage, by the way, although you need to swap out "moods” for “substances”, “sex" for “wise parental-style nuggets of advice, and "telling your wife she looks great no matter what she is wearing" for “genetic roulette”. Anyway, it is the “what you don’t say” category of the parenting formula that is the focus of today's post:

The scene: Me, in shower, 6:30 a.m., Owen peeing in toilet 3 feet away;

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[NOTE FROM REDPLANET: THE MIDDLE OF THIS PREVIOUSLY POSTED ENTRY HAS BEEN DELETED AT THE REQUEST OF THE REDPLANET POSTING STANDARDS BOARD, SO YOU WILL JUST HAVE TO LET YOUR IMAGINATION TAKE IT FROM HERE - SORT OF A "CREATE YOUR OWN CLOUD EIGHT POST" FEATURE. YOU ARE SET UP FOR A GOOD START, AS ANY STORY THAT STARTS WITH SHOWERING AND PEEING IS NATURALLY GOING TO BE HILARIOUS. GOOD LUCK, AND, NOW, BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING.

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What I said: “I have no idea.”

See, this parenting stuff is a breeze.

P.S. If you added up the percentages above and were tempted to point out that they totaled 110%, you: (1) have way too much time on your hands; and (2) must be a bad parent because all good parents know that if you aren’t giving 110% your kids will end up in the juvenile home.