It's not a vacation when there are children

Last week we were on vacation. Kind of. Sort of. Kind of in the way that there was a weekend, and then Monday. We took the kids to daycare. I got my hair done (wheee!) and we had lunch, but then I went to work due to a deadline, and The Man went home to pack, clean, cook, shop, and get us prepared for the trip.

Monday evening we put the kids to bed and tried frantically to get ourselves finalized, when The Girl woke up with That Cough. You know, the seal-barking, fever-accompanied CROUP cough. She tossed and turned and coughed all night, a burning hot little body near mine.

We called the airline the next morning, and they very kindly changed our tickets from 10am Tuesday to 10am Wednesday, but cheerfully charged us an arm and a leg to do so.

We medicated, rocked, soothed, and comforted. We packed some more.

We left Wednesday, still ill. Still sneezing and needing immediate kleenex, OMG ew. We organized The Boy and The Girl on the airplane with books! and toys! and babies! and snacks! and an iPad! and sat back and endured 1.5 hours of airplane, got a rental car, drove three hours (through which The Girl, mercifully, slept).

And then there were grandparents. The next day, cousins and aunt and uncle. And there were beds to be made and children to feed and soothe when cousins didn't want to play, and clothes to clean and naps to procure and safety to oversee. There was a girl child who still was sick and not sleeping and a boy child who couldn't quite keep up and who doesn't enjoy the same outdoor pursuits as his cousins, and there was a grandma who didn't know that bedtime was 7pm and that dinner at 7:15 would throw a spanner in the works, to say the least. (Or rather, it just meant that I fed one kid early, coped with a really overtired kid the next day, and didn't get any dinner.) There were games to play and acreage to explore, and swings to build. I played basketball for the first time in 15 years or more.

On the way back there was much screaming on the flight, to the delight of my fellow passengers.

Tomorrow we are taking them both to daycare, and I feel immensely guilty about it. But Oh My Lord, it's two days, two days of not having to constantly be on for someone else's needs, two days of the year when it's just us, which we haven't had since April of 2010. So.

Vacation.

Two days, but I'll take it.