What changes when you go on vacation with three people
Exactly a year ago we were in the same place in Italy for Otis's very first vacation. We had only been parents for eight weeks, so everything was completely new: traveling, twice as much luggage, sleeping in a different place, and a completely different daily schedule than before. From now on, no vacation will contain complete rest, unless we manage to sneak away just the two of us. Of course, you get countless precious moments in return, so I'm happy to give up those lazy-ass-with-a-cocktail-in-hand-and-a-stack-of-magazines vacations for this.
But man oh man, what I would do for a morning of sleeping in until ten o'clock during these two weeks of vacation. The reality is that we sit up in bed every day at six o'clock with a gigantic hangover feeling (and it's not because of the amount of drinks the night before, I wish that were the case) with Otis on our lap. I pull out all the stops in the hope that he can entertain himself for another hour or enjoy a nice nap between dad and mom, but that turns out to be a utopia: like a Duracell bunny, he crawls all over us, constantly heading for the edge of the bed. So nowadays we have breakfast at half past six in the morning and count down the minutes until his morning nap, which we are all too happy to join.
Another thing that changes forever until your kids can entertain themselves for a few hours in a row: the amount of reading material that gets consumed during your holiday. When Jon stuffed no less than three books (!) into his suitcase, I sincerely asked if he had booked a different vacation than we did. I bet on a half-read LINDA. magazine that I couldn't finish at home, but that should be doable, right?
And those evenings out to eat three villages away are also not in the cards for now. We often took the little one with us from day one when we went out to eat, and Otis would sleep wonderfully with the nice restaurant noise in the background, but now that he is almost walking, sleeping in the stroller is becoming increasingly difficult. And although we constantly shout out loud that our child ‘can really stay up two hours later’, he still wakes up precisely at six o'clock in the morning, meaning he has slept two hours less, which doesn't make the rest of the day any more pleasant. But luckily, all the new adventures make up for it: cooking together in the evening and looking at the starry sky is a thousand times more fun (and cheaper) than a tavern, watching Otis who enjoys a little water bath with a rake and a bucket is much more blissful than the best book ever written, and our motto has become that you ’save sleep for the afterlife’. This way, we gain two vacation hours net per day. Ah, that vacation with a little one doesn't sound so bad yet...
