Of course, getting there is important. You paid for the hotel room. The theme park tickets. You have to make the flight in order to get to the beach.
But do you have to make the flight miserable?
It’s strange. Most of us look back on our own childhoods as needlessly stressful, see that our parents were awfully hard on us. We laugh at Boomers and all their funny habits—there’s a whole series of home insurance commercials about this—yet the second we start traveling, we seem to turn into them.
The trip, we need to understand, is part of the trip. Getting there is not separate from the vacation. So if the point is for our family to be together, if the point is for us to have fun together, to relax together, to get closer together, we need to start much earlier. Planning the trip should not be a nightmare. Packing up should not be a nightmare. Being on the road should not be a nightmare. Leaving to go back home should not be a nightmare.
The worst part about all this is the unfair expectations it puts on the trip itself too. Now it has to be worth all the headache and arguments and tension that went into making it happen. Instead of just being what it can be: Fun. Time together. Getting from one place to another.
Relax. That’s the whole point of the vacation, isn’t it? It’s not to get so stressed that you need a vacation from your vacation…or be so uptight and anxious that your family needs a vacation from you.
P.S. We can always buy more things and go on more trips as parents, but we can’t buy more time with our children. It’s why we created the Tempus Fugit medallion (Tempus Fugit translates to “Time Flies,” by the way) as a useful reminder to slow down and stay more in the moment with our children while we still can. Grab one to carry around with you on your next trip as a family at the Daily Dad store today!
