Pre-Vacation Jitters No. 1

Here is a little something I'm working on just for fun. We just returned from a two week vacation which took us through 6 states and covered nearly 1,800 miles. Luckily, the first 24 hours were somewhat of an anomaly and didn't set the tone for the remaining 13 days.

I shoved the last suitcase into the back of our decade-old minivan like a puzzle piece, maybe the wrong one, that has to be worked a little to vigorously to fit into place. Undecided whether prayer or profanity would better help my cause, I settled on a swift, yet aggressive downward thrust of the hatch door. It clicked shut. We were most definitely, one hundred percent ready to go.

Never, in my 12 years of family vacations, had we been so prepared for a trip. The refrigerator was emptied and cleaned with leftovers dutifully wrapped and stored in the freezer. Garbage had been emptied and even the carpet bore the telltale, zen-like lines of the vacuum cleaner.

The kids were asleep, dreaming no doubt not of the 16 hours of driving which lay ahead of us, but of the fun they would have once we reached our destination, our promised land: Disneyland.

I had just a few more loose ends to tie up before I could hit the sheets. We had planned to wake up at 5am and pull out around 5:30am and I wanted to get as much sleep as I could so I could help out with the next days driving. I did a final e-mail check, picked up a few stray toys in the playroom, and got ready for bed. It was 11pm and everything was working out perfectly, maybe a little too perfectly.

An hour later, my sleep was suddenly interrupted by a quiet, but urgent voice at my bedside. Jonah, my 4 year old was complaining about something. I didn’t quite register it through the partial fog of sleep that still clouded my brain, but I heard something about a cough or a sore throat, so I fished a lozenge out of the overstuffed nightstand drawer, helped Jonah get it out of the wrapper, and walked him back to bed.