Rough Reentry, Sudden Surgery, and Lost Comments

I know I've written about this a few dozen times at least, but I LOVE vacations. I love traveling with the kids and James, love being somewhere new, love spending time together... I may love my regular life (and I do!), but I love checking out of all its responsibilities and being with my family in a new place even more. James and I have always been 100% together on our priority to go on adventures with our kids, even when they were young and we had very little money and we just drove to neighboring states and stayed in state park cabins and spent less than $500 per trip. Making memories with our core crew was important to us and vacations were our favorite way to do it. Plus, we had kids really young and we weren't going to give up on our 20's and 30's because of it.

I saw this meme a friend posted and it perfectly captured what I would try to explain to others when we traveled so much with our young pack 10+ years ago.

I think about it often. There's much the kids don't remember, particularly Cora, but I do and I treasure the memories from our trips in a way that is different from my also-fond memories of our day-to-day life at various stages. For me there's something brighter about memories made on vacation; maybe it's because I've also always worked full time, but vacation memories just stand out bolder in my mind, like they're easier to grab onto when we make them, maybe because they allow us to be together without the distractions and tasks of regular life.

Anyway, the point is that I really love vacations and I already have a countdown until our next one in December (133 days). BUT ALSO, the reentry from vacations is the freaking worst and I get why people would think they'd rather just not go. Often this is because I like to get sick as soon as we enter the airspace over DFW, but this time, I am the only one not making our life complicated. (Cora and Milo are also relatively unproblematic.)

We got back from Idaho Falls on Wednesday evening. Despite our increased vacation budget, I am still too cheap for onsite airport parking, so we waited in the 110 degree heat for the remote parking bus to take us to our car-- our navy blue exterior, black leather car that had been baking for 9 days in the sun because I am also too cheap for covered parking. The car was predictably hellishly hot inside, but less predictably, it also wouldn't start. So we stood on the asphalt parking lot, absolutely baking, while waiting for an extra shuttle bus to come by and jump us. That worked (thank you bus!) and we drove home with plans to force ourselves to stop at the grocery store because vacation mode was over and meals at home were back on the menu. We pulled up to the store, turned off the car, and then found out it wasn't a one-time drained battery, it was a dead battery and the car wouldn't turn back on again. I got groceries while James made awkward eye-contact with people in the parking lot to get someone to jump us again. It was SO HOT I hated making anyone stay outside a minute longer than necessary, but he found a volunteer quickly (thank you kind sir!). We got home about 8 pm, unpacked, started wash, ate dinner, and went to bed. Thursday morning was going to be busy and now that we were down 1 car and up 1 car appointment, it was going to be more so. Also, Landon mentioned off-hand that his back left tooth hurt maybe like a lot?

So at 9 am Thursday morning, we jumped James's car with Landon's, James headed out to NTB, Landon headed to his high school orientation, I dropped Claire off at the orthodontist to get her braces off on my way to work, and Cora was left at home because #thirdbaby. I had back-to-back (to-back-to-back) calls, James got a new battery, Landon called the dentist while waiting in line for his junior year schedule, they referred him to a periodontist, and he made an appointment for 11 am. Meanwhile, James picked up Claire to take her straight to her own high school orientation while I called the periodontist to explain that we could not attend Landon's appointment with him and what could I sign and PDF over to them so they can please treat him. James picked Claire up from her orientation (she was nervous; it went great!), I left work early to pick up Maggie from the boarding doggie summer camp she attended and bring her home. While on the way, the periodontist called to tell me Landon's wisdom tooth was impacted and causing severe swelling and they could take all of them out tomorrow (now today) at 10:45. James was taking Claire back to school for her student/parent meet-the-teachers event and I took Cora to HER meet-the-teacher night at her school. We made dinner at 8 pm and informed Landon he was having surgery in the morning because apparently he missed that detail from the doctor who I'm 100% certain explained it to him. He insisted he did not need surgery and could just chew on his right side forever.

(James just called: Landon is out of surgery and doing great. I could hear Landon in the background saying, "Tell Mom I was a champion." He wants to go to swim practice this afternoon. James countered with Smoothie King, a nap, and two cats. I believe he won.)

Also! We had appointments at 9 am this morning to get all the kids passports renewed because we HAVE to do it in the summer because the passport office basically runs on the school schedule and getting 3 kids out of 3 schools is impossible. Luckily, Landon's impromptu oral surgery could be worked around that task, and my 10 am call could proceed as scheduled when it was done.

And now everything is done! I made sure everyone got their uniforms, backpacks, books, and school shoes all set before we left on our trip, so there is none of that to do thank god. And strangely we have absolutely nothing to do this weekend (except write the vacation report blog posts!).

Brace-free!

I'm at work, currently eating an Aloha bar at my desk for lunch, very glad that I leaned hard on my personal philosophy that you should work as absolutely little as you can on vacation- the return is going to suck regardless, so might as well unplug while you can. And I did! I opened my laptop exactly one time to respond to a client email that my team was already on top of, generally perused my Outlook app on my phone whenever we got back to the cabin to be sure nothing was on fire, and otherwise read silly books, drank sparkling rose, and slept a LOT whenever we weren't hiking or adventuring somewhere. It was glorious.

Today's work 'fit

So! We've been back for less than 48 hours and it's been quite a ride. Maggie is so tired from camp that we keep forgetting she's home; even snoring is too much effort for her as she recharges in her doggie house charging station. The cats are delighted to have us back; Claire said Milo basically slept on her face all night Wednesday night and Moose keeps hanging out near us even though he usually only does that when we're being stationary. Cora is excited about school (ish) and we are excited about still having one kid in sweet, simple elementary school. Claire likes having smooth teeth again and is maybe kind of sort of ready and excited for her freshman year of high school. Landon is ready but not excited for junior year. James is glad to have a car that turns on when requested and I am glad that he and the kids can operate without me because I am making up for all the not-working I did while vacationing.

OH! ALSO! Last night while sitting on the couch not working I clicked on the "comments" tab of my ancient blogger account. I noticed there was a "spam" category and when I clicked on it I found well over 200 comments that were definitely NOT spam (amongst a couple thousand that absolutely were), including several comments OF MINE from my own damn blogger account in response to comments you all left and I feel terrible you didn't see them! And that I didn't see some of yours! They went all the way back to 2007, so I'm sure most will remain unseen, scattered throughout the archives of this blog, but particularly if you asked something in the last few posts, there's probably a response from me now. And my Snow Day AMA from last year now has some previously unpublished responses. I'm so sorry those were missing so long. Your comments are my favorite things after I sent these thoughts out into the black hole of the internet and I feel terrible I didn't see them when they were written and/or you didn't see my response!

According to this tab I never clicked on before, I have over 18,800 of them, so thank you! I promise to pay better attention from now on...