Vacation

We just got home from a vacation.  Yes, it was a real live vacation- in that we were away from home for 6 days and put a lot of miles on the old Suburban. 

I don't know if I have ever shared this before, but I don't really love trips.  I don't like living out of a suitcase, I like my own bed and I don't like all my stuff crammed into a car.

Especially intolerable are vacations with kids.  Someone is bound to pee in their carseat, vomit in the vehicle, lose something or have a meltdown on the end of Navy Pier.  Not that that has ever happened to us or anything.

It is easier to control chaos at home.

Noah and I took some cool road trips before kids.  Nothing exotic or anything- we are not really the traveling type.  We have always had jobs or responsibilities to tie us down.  We had our kids young, so maybe we will have a chance to go more places when we get older :)  Anyway, we went to Atlanta, St. Louis, Gulf Shores and Niagara Falls. After kids we have left them at home to go to Seattle and Boston and Noah went solo to California and Wyoming. 

When we just had the 3 boys we took a road trip to Mt. Rushmore, because Deacon wanted to see "the faces".  We took the Granny Nanny with and the trip went pretty well.  We had a 1:1 ratio, so how bad could it be?  Roman did miss home and I think that was our first realization about what a homebody he is.  We spent a lot of time on that trip helping 3 year old Roman make lists about the things that he liked to make himself feel better.

After that we mostly stuck with camping or short weekends close to home until the fateful day in 2011 when we decided that we should go on another vacation.  We decided to group my cousins wedding reception in Illinois with an exciting trip to Chicago.

All the pictures from that trip were lost in a massive harddrive debacle.  I don't know that we care.  We have sort of tried to erase that trip from our memory.  There were happy moments: like being  at Lego Land and the Children's Museum.  There were also scary moments like riding the city busses and trying to get on the L with 4 kids and a stroller.  There were traumatizing moments like Berean laying in a pile of Tulle and sobbing, Roman having a complete and total meltdown in the fetal position on Navy Pier and running for blocks from the bus to the museum through a massive downpour combined with wind.

That trip took the wind out of our sails and we were back to mini vacations and a policy against going anywhere further than 3 hours away.

Until last week.  A few months ago my mom's brothers and sister decided to set up a family weekend getaway.  Our family with all the aunts, uncles, and cousins were going to meet at a resort in Missouri for a long weekend.  Noah and I decided to attach a trip to St. Louis at the front end of the weekend.

This addition led to the 6 day long real live vacation.

I became more concerned about how this would go the closer that it got, but we had things lined up so we had to persist.  We spent days planning our food, our clothes, researching museums and booking hotels.  In between that I also worked my shifts all smushed together and prepared our house, yard and commitments for being away for so long.    Noah was busy at work so we had a stressful few days leading up to our departure which made me even more anxious.

Deacon played a baseball game last Tuesday night and when it was over at 8:30pm Noah, my sister, all the kids and I piled into the Suburban and headed south! 

More to come...