This weekend, though, Ellie got a brief taste of being an only child. The big kids went to New Hampshire with my in-laws, and we had a full 72 hours of only one non-mobile (no climbing on things she isn’t supposed to), non-verbal (no whining or backtalk), multi-nap-per-day child.

Holy crap was that easy.

If Ellie really was my only child, I wouldn’t think it was easy at all.  I’d bemoan how much your life changes when you have a baby, how you can’t just go out any time you feel like it, how I always have to balance when she needs to be fed and when she needs to sleep. Blah blah blah.

But I have the perspective of having three kids, including two who are nearly done napping and almost never stop talking. So I can enjoy the quiet in my house when the baby takes 2-3 naps during the day, and is out for the night at 6:30PM.  I can revel in actually letting the poor kid take a real nap, instead of hoping she’ll sleep in the car as I drag her to preschool gymnastics class.  I can laugh about how simple it was to head out for an early dinner, with two adults and one infant.  I can finally have an answer to the question I used to ask (mostly in my head) when my twins were infants: “what do parents of one child DO with all that free time?”  The answer? Get SO MUCH DONE. We purged the dining room, I nearly finished one quilt and started another. We watched movies and got errands done in what felt like record-setting time.

And when she wasn’t sleeping? I actually COULD spend time just hanging out with her. Lying on my bed while she grabbed the pillows, her lovey, my nose.  Talking to her about our plans for the day. Narrating my sewing while she hung out in the bouncy seat. The kind of calm interaction and enjoying of her that I didn’t get to do as much when there were two her size.

Oh, sure, I missed my big kids, and I was glad to have them back at the end of the long weekend. I missed their storytelling and their funny logic and their hugs and kisses (not so much with the whining and backtalk).  Truth be told, I’m not a “baby person.” I adore my sweet girl and her smile and her delicious chubby cheeks. But babies aren’t really that much… fun.  As crazy as the four-year-olds can make me, I really do love each age more than the last.

But oh, it was a sweet, peaceful weekend. We’ll have to do it again next summer.

THE GOOD:

The kids were super travelers. Even Ellie, on her first flights, who was cutting her second tooth the entire time. And while I was adamant that I could have taken all three kids by myself (M couldn’t take that much time off from work and didn’t arrive until much later), I’m very glad my mom was there. Solo-ing it would have been foolish.

10 days of extra people to constantly entertain my kids was awesome. My mom got up with them and made breakfast. My stepdad was so excited to have them there, I lost count of how many fun things he had set up for them to do. My teenage cousins showed up and Daniel & Becca completely forgot anyone else was there. And my aunts practically lined up for turns holding Ellie.

The indulgences never ended. Delicious dinners every night. Late bedtimes. Lollipops a-plenty. Bonfires and roasted marshmallows. Always someone willing to go fishing or swimming or do a puzzle.

The kids were really good about water safety. We had a clear rule that they could only go on the dock (much less in a boat or in the water) with a lifejacket on, and there was zero pushback. Only once or twice did they forget and put so much as a foot on the dock without one.

Despite the first few days being a relative heatwave, the weather was largely beautiful, the lake wasn’t too cold, and we spent the majority of every day outside.

THE BAD:

By the end, the late bedtimes and hit-or-miss naps got a little out of hand and the big kids got kind of cranky. (Ellie, bless her, took some SERIOUS naps and was always down for the night between 6 and 7.)

We had to get up at 3:45AM for our return trip. It beat the alternative of starting the travel at 5PM and not getting home until midnight, but still. That was ugly.

The lake had a nasty bout of Swimmer’s Itch, a yucky little parasite that sometimes lives in the shallow water and can get under your skin if you’re not careful. This year, it was in much deeper water than normal. And despite taking what we thought were appropriate precautions, Daniel and I got it, bad.  The itching was so awful, I literally felt sick to my stomach that first day. Daniel tried to hide under couch cushions and said it made him “crazy and mad.” Thankfully, a bit of benadryl took the edge off, and the itching was mostly gone the next day. The welts however, are only just now fading from my arms, almost two weeks later. We found a zinc-based sunscreen ointment that seemed to provide a barrier, so thankfully we didn’t have to completely abandon the water.

THE UGLY:

My mom’s dog, a 100+ pound Golden/Newfoundland mix, bit Rebecca. On the face. AGAIN. This would be the third time in two years, and yes, I’m livid.  While a mostly friendly dog, he’s unpredictable. We were keeping them separated for much of the trip, and keeping a close eye when they were in the room together. Rebecca’s offense? She’s a completely undeterred dog lover, all shapes and sizes. She went to give him a pat on the head and maybe a little kiss, and he bit her.

I am done with this animal. Believe me, I am a dog lover, too. But since I can’t trust this one, even with reasonable amounts of supervision, I’m done. Some shit is going to hit the fan when I have to tell my mom that we won’t stay at her house for Christmas with the dog there, but I’m not quite ready to have that discussion yet.

It happened on the last day of our trip, which was a miserable way to end it. My mom was very upset and constantly apologetic. M (who had arrived a few days earlier) showed considerable restraint in that he neither yelled at my mom nor kicked (or worse) the dog.

Canine drama aside, it really was a good trip, and I’m glad we went. The kids had a blast, I found it relatively relaxing, and I was glad that plenty of my extended family members got to meet Ellie. And, as with any vacation, I’m glad to be back home.

My gift to him for the last four years has been the same: a three-photo frame with pictures of the kids and the letters D-A-D. (If you’d like, here’s 2008, 2009, and 2010.)  Obviously, this year, we had a new occupant of the middle frame.

A very happy Father’s Day to all of the dads out there, most especially our very own M.

Oh, sure. I can go to the hospital any time I would like, I can hold her as much as I want when I’m there. I can change diapers, give her a little sponge bath, take her temperature.  And that’s all well and good, I’m glad she’s so stable that I don’t have any restrictions (other than the length of the wires and feeding tube) as to how I can handle her.  But changing diapers is not the thing I’m missing.  I miss having some real say on what her/our day is like. I want to take her for walks, I want to put her down for naps, I want to feed her when she’s hungry.  I want her home, in my world.  But, for the moment, that’s just not in the cards.

For right now, we wait and wait and wait. M and I are passengers on this train, with zero control over where it’s going and when it stops.  We are Ellie’s visitors at the hospital, instead of the ones running the show at home. The nurses are wonderful and all, but I can’t wait until I never, ever see them again.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel totally in control when I’m home, either. My in-laws were here for the last three weeks, and by necessity have been in charge of a lot of the things at the house for much of that time.  They flew home this afternoon, and my mom comes up tomorrow with a one-way ticket. Without the grandparents, getting downtown for our hospital visits would be about 100 times more complicated. With them around, the kids get some extra attention while we can take a little bit of time with our visits. Not to mention the fact that my laundry is always folded and the dishes are always clean (a clear indication that M and I are NOT the ones in charge right now).

But even when we’re home, it’s like I’m barely here. I’m always going upstairs to pump, or trying to rest, or coming from or going to the hospital. My time with Daniel & Becca is limited, and much of the daily grind of meals and naps and rules is left to someone else.  It’s a big adjustment for someone who has been in charge of ALL of it for the last 3.5 years. On the one hand, my inner control freak is screaming, “ugh, just move over and let me do it!”  But, then, I can’t be rude to the people who are loving my kids and keeping my family afloat. And, truth be told, I literally do not have the time and energy to do half of the things I would normally take care of. So I step back, I withdraw a little, to avoid conflict. And then, there I am again, in the back seat instead of driving.

It’s all temporary, I know. The time will soon come that I am completely overwhelmed by being on my own with three kids, I will wish for the days of constant grandparents. In the meantime, so much of this really is out of my control for now, and I need to just accept it. But it’s so counter to my natural state of being, it’s a daily struggle. I don’t like not being in charge, I don’t like not knowing what’s coming. It’s a little too scary and chaotic for me. I want to grab hold again.

There was the Hawaii trip, which was lovely and all, but the travel and re-entry was brutal.  A few days after we got back, and well before we had gotten over the jet-lag, it was Thanksgiving (at my house, though blessedly small).  Barely a week after that, my in-laws came to town for 10 days.  And while they didn’t stay with us, and are very nice people, it’s still an additional stressor to have visitors.

After they left, I had precisely one week to get my act together (barely) to fly to Chicago for our annual Christmas trip, where we stayed at both of my parents’ houses over the course of a single week.

Christmas is exhausting.  It was always tiring, just with the back-and-forth balancing act that is life with divorced parents.  Add in the whole “I converted to Judaism and am trying to raise Jewish kids” thing, and a husband who is generally not psyched about it all, and it’s nothing short of an emotional minefield.  The cherry on top, of course, is that I am now firmly in my 3rd trimester, exhausted, but cannot sleep well on the best of nights, much less on an unfamiliar bed.

The kids did spectacularly well throughout this travel marathon.  They enjoyed their first snow of the season (it started snowing in Boston a few hours after we left, and we did get back to town in time for snOMG, Snowmageddon, or whatever the hell we’re calling this).  They made one snow angel after another with my mom, and thoroughly enjoyed the pile my dad made in the backyard for sledding.

We had incredibly late bedtimes, hit-or-miss naps, party after party, and crowds of relatives they only see once or twice a year.  And yet, miraculously, tantrums and meltdowns were near zero.  Daniel came out of the defiant funk he’d been in while my in-laws were in town (delightful!) to become nothing short of Mr. Congeniality.  Rebecca swung a bit more in the other direction with a little whininess and extra demanding behavior, but nothing too severe.

Me? By 7:30pm on Christmas, as we made our SIXTH stop of the day with no naps for anyone, I was so tired I almost burst into tears.  The balancing, the logistics, the constant interaction, the heaviness of the belly, the full week of disrupted sleep.  I was D-U-N done.

Our flight home the next day was at 7:00 in the morning.  We woke up to an extra 4-6 inches of snow, which made our drive to the airport a rather slow adventure.  I crossed my fingers and toes that we would make it back to Boston before the Snowpocalypse shut the airport, and despite a mechanical delay, we were blessedly successful.

I sent M to the grocery store while I threw on a movie for the kids and a load of laundry in the wash.  I have not left the house, save for 10 minutes in the snow this afternoon, since we gt home from the airport.  For the next two months, I have no intention of going more than about a 3-mile radius from my house.  Preschool pickup and dropoff. Doctor’s appointments.  Maybe Target if I’m feeling saucy.  I’m only going to the gym for the kids’ activities, as I have cut my own exercise down to Prenatal Yoga and nothing more.  I don’t want visitors. I just want to sit quietly in my house, have a daily routine, get some sewing done, maybe take a nap.

When we were in Chicago, my grandmother innocently asked me what my next trip was, and if I was coming to Florida.  I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.  Not an ice cube’s chance in hell.

I’m 29 weeks pregnant. Stick a fork in me.

Because despite all that?  TOTALLY worth it.  It was an awesome vacation.  And yes, I actually used the word vacation.

The first thing that made it awesome: traveling with a large and helpful group.  A total of ten adults and four kids.  My dad and stepmom were obviously enthusiastic kid-watchers, and all of the extra pairs of eyes were great.  My stepbrother’s daughter is only 10 months younger than my kids, so she was an awesome extra playmate.

The house we stayed in was to die for.  Five bedrooms, three full bathrooms, huge (and well-equipped) kitchen, covered outdoor eating/lounging area with a table big enough for all of us to eat dinner together, and even a small pool.

And it was one house away from the beach.  A beautiful stretch of beach, completely uncrowded, just people walking or running by with their dogs.

I hereby declare the rental beach house to be possibly the most ideal mode of vacation with young kids, and not just because this particular house was a million times nicer than my own.  No, I think it’s perfect because it gives you so many options.  When you stay in a hotel, you are either cooped up in the room, or you are out Doing Something.  You have basically no option but to eat at restaurants, which gets old, real fast.  Especially with young kids.

In the beach rental, you have space.  You have flexibility.  You have options.  You can stock the kitchen with cereal and sandwich fixings, and you can choose to make a real dinner if you’re so inclined (on this trip, each family group took a night to be responsible for dinner).  You have space to just hang out and lay low if it’s a quiet kind of a day, and the adults have somewhere to hang out and relax when the kids are asleep.

And then there’s the beach aspect.  Oh, the beach.  What a joy, to be able to put your towels and toys in a little wagon and be so close that you don’t even bother putting on shoes.  Once again, it takes the pressure off of finding Something To Do for every moment of every day of your trip.  You can just decide to wake up slowly, eat your breakfast, watch a little Curious George, and then spend the morning at the beach.  And then wander back on your own time for a snack or when someone is tired of the sand.  So, so lovely.

We did some of the other great Oahu things, of course.  We took the kids to the (nice but surprisingly small) Waikiki Aquarium, where they got a kick out of the audio tour.

We went to a Luau, where I started chatting with one of the dancers (not the guy in the picture) only to find out she has two-year-old identical twin boys.  Twin moms find each other, everywhere we go.

We left the kids at home with the grandparents (woot!) so that we could spend most of the day taking in Pearl Harbor.  It was on M’s absolute-must-see list, and I’m glad we didn’t have to rush it and entertain the kids. As it was, my pregnant ass could barely keep up with all the walking.

All told, it was an amazing vacation, a practically once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (thank you, Dad!).  Would I have had the guts to do it on my own? Most likely not.  But boy am I glad we did.

If for no other reason than to hear M proclaim that he has found his happy place.

For a guy who’s a major home-body and not much of a traveler, to hear him proclaim his love for it over and over, or to say that, if he didn’t have a wife and kids, he would have called his boss and told him he was never coming back to work, but instead going to live on the beach… and you couldn’t pick someone who is less of a “beach person.”  Yeah, it was that awesome.

When M and I got married, we considered going to Hawaii.  Cliche, perhaps, but there’s a reason for that! Ultimately, we decided it was entirely too far to travel from Boston, especially since we didn’t have two weeks to spend there.  Thus, the prospect of going this time, now with a pair of three-year-olds in tow, was a little daunting. Most terrifying of all was the length of the plane travel. But, when your dad calls and says we’re all taking a big family trip to Hawaii, do you really turn that sort of thing down? Hell no.

Our particular flight configuration had us flying from Boston to Chicago (~2 hours), and then getting on the long-haul flight direct from Chicago to Honolulu with the rest of my family (just over 9 hours).  We left our house at 5AM Eastern time, and arrived in Hawaii at about 3PM local time (8PM Eastern time).  15 hours of travel, more than 11 of which was in the air.

It was brutally long, especially back in cattle-class, where we were crammed in to the least amount of space possible, and the flight attendants treated everyone like a major inconvenience (thanks, United! Friendly skies, my ass).  But we survived without major incident. Here’s how I think we managed it:

1. Don’t underestimate the excitement factor of going on vacation. Having something fabulous waiting at the end goes a long way to getting everyone started out in a reasonably good mood.
2. Snacks, galore.  While they are nice enough to let you buy overpriced food on board [grumble grumble], my kids were clearly not going to go for the Thai Chicken Wrap.  I had a big bag of favorite snacks and treats. Yes, it meant we were a little short on eating meals of real substance, but at least no one was starving.
3. Screen time.  I have long maintained that travel is not the time to limit exposure to TV, movies, video games, and the like.  We had the DVD player, fully charged, which can get us at least two full-length movies, and maybe a few shorter shows.  We had our laptops with us, which could double as DVD players in a pinch.  We had our iPhones, with a few episodes of Backyardigans loaded, not to mention the highly-coveted games.  Additionally, there were two movies on our flight, at least one of which was fairly kid-friendly (Despicable Me).  Or, at least, kid-friendly enough that I was happy to let them watch it.
4. Other activities. In addition to movies and games, we also had paper with stickers and crayons, mini-Magna Doodles, and Water WOW coloring books.  Yes, this all sounds like a lot of stuff.  But M and I each had large-ish backpacks, and the kids carried their own backpacks.  I had minimal stuff of my own, but that’s alright.
5. Extra people. While I’ve gotten pretty comfortable in flying solo with my kids, I would avoid doing so on such a long flight if at all possible. Being able to pass them off to my siblings or my parents was a nice way to kill another 15 minutes or so.

This being a daytime flight, unfortunately there was very minimal sleeping.  I think Rebecca took a bit of a nap, but there was no way Daniel was going down.  Still, we survived, and when we got off that plane (in 80-degree weather), my pair and their 2.5-year-old cousin were positively bouncing off the walls. The 9-month-old was a little dazed, but also happy to be free.

The flight back was a rather different beast, as it did not leave until 5PM.  Ah yes, the red-eye.  Our strategy was to let them watch a movie as soon as we were airborne, and then attempt to get them to sleep the rest of the way.  VERY mixed results, and a matched set of unfortunate potty accidents (don’t forget the extra clothes!).  But at least it was dark, they dozed, and heading east with the jetstream makes the flight almost an hour and a half shorter.  Bleary-eyed and desperate to be home (a day late, but at least we weren’t throwing up anymore), the 8-hour red-eye, two-hour layover, and two-hour flight back to Boston were just kind of an exhausted blur.

I’ll talk in another post about the good and bad of jet lag.  But the long flights were the parts of this trip I dreaded the most, and while they weren’t exactly a barrel of laughs, we survived them without killing each other.  That’ll go down as a success in my book.

I’m not.

I’d like to say that we’ve stayed an extra day in Hawai’i because it’s just that much fun.  Alas, no.  The truth is that we changed our flights because of the Stomach Bug From Hell, which has taken down at least 11 of the 14 family members in this house.

It all started to go downhill on Thursday.  We got back to the house after visiting Pearl Harbor, and things just seemed… off. I chalked it up to typical family dynamics and sharing space with grown siblings for a full week, and that was part of it.  But then, down went my brother.  Within minutes, Rebecca followed suit, sick as a dog all night long.

Over the next few days, nearly everyone else got sick (I stayed in bed almost the entire day yesterday, quite unheard of), and I don’t mean “just didn’t feel so hot.”  Ooh, it was a doozy, one person to the next.  Yesterday was the day M and I and the kids were supposed to head home.  Because I’m stubborn and always anxious to go home, I initially pushed back on M’s suggestion to change our flight.  Thankfully, he won. He was right.  Not only was I a train wreck all day long, but Daniel succumbed shortly after bedtime (which would have been halfway through our flight… ugh).

As of this morning, Sunday, Daniel seems fine. I’m a bit better, but still no desire to consume anything other than ginger ale and saltines, and generally stay hydrated for the benefit of the small baby swimming around in my abdomen. M is in bed, I can’t tell if he’s about to be our final victim.

Oh, and the gas valve on the rental house broke, so we have no working stove and no hot water. And we’re almost out of paper towels and toilet paper.

If someone could just beam me instantly back to my house, that would be awesome.

Oh, did I not mention we were leaving? Yeah. We left. 12 hours in the air later, we landed on this awfully nice island, and unpacked in this awfully nice house, with 10 other members of my family.

The next morning, we discovered one benefit of jetlag: even your night-owl of a husband can get up early enough to walk to the beach for the sunrise.

All is well here, we’ll be back in cold, gray New England before we know it, and I will tell you all about how we survived that much time in an airplane.  In the meantime, I’m going back to the beach with these two knuckleheads.

My mom and stepdad have been here for much of the week. Always fun to have a visit, but the two of them are an unstoppable force of nature when it comes to cleaning, purging, and home improvement projects.

The garage, which M and I purged substantially when my in-laws were here, is now practically sparkling and perfectly organized.

The basement, which was still a bit of a wreck from our furnace and A/C install in July, got the same treatment.  Shelves moved, stuff categorized and up on palates, swept and shop-vac’d, and downright spacious.

The sunroom, which had maintained its “throw all the crap in there when company is coming over” status even after I moved my sewing space there, is now a joy to work in.  Shelves hung, light fixture replaced, carpet down. Crap removed. Fabric reorganized and stored. Aaahh.

The guest room, our “throw all the crap in there” room on the 2nd floor, has a closet that I haven’t even been able to approach for months.  Piles of books, old clothes, boxes of all that miscellaneous junk you don’t know what to do with.  Two of M’s leather jackets he hasn’t worn in years, two bridesmaid dresses belonging to my sister-in-law. A tie-fighter helmet from Star Wars.  My wedding dress, hermetically sealed and in a giant cardboard box.

But here’s the problem – sometime in the next six months, that room has to change identities and become home for a small new person to be named later.  Enter: my mom.

One after another, we filled big black plastic contractor bags.  Some heading to the Salvation Army.  Many in my driveway waiting for trash day, since our FOUR big trash barrels are already full from the week’s work.  Box after box of books thrown into the huge donation bin in the grocery store parking lot. And so much wedding stuff, thrown in there as soon as we moved into our new house, still newlyweds.  Finally, the dried-and-not-in-a-good-way bouquet, lovingly admired one more time and thrown in the trash along with the formerly-white shoes.  The dress, up to the attic.  And the veil, which I liked but see no reason to preserve indefinitely, has gone into Rebecca’s new costume box.  But not the sparkly comb we unearthed from the same dusty box.  That stays with me. For now.

So much done. SO MUCH crap out of my house, and either into the trash or ready to be donated. Plenty yet to be done, of course, but a massive push in the right direction.

No offense though, Mom, but I’ll be ready when you fly home tomorrow. I need a nap.