Why Vacationing with Kids Is Worth It

Prior to kids, I looked forward to our week-long summer beach trip all year long.  It was a precious opportunity to sleep late, enjoy leisurely conversation with my husband and family, read my way through piles of books, and nap in the sunshine to the sound of ocean waves.

When Ellie was just a few months old and parenthood was still new, we took her to the beach for a long weekend with my parents.   I remember that trip clearly:  the rhythm of feedings that had to be continued, day and night, the difficulty of squeezing in a few hours on the beach in between naps, the never-ending stuff that had to be carted with us everywhere we went. 

I learned that summer that vacation with a child was, well, pretty much like being at home with a child: days filled with caring  for the needs of another.  If anything, vacation threw off our routines and made us all extra tired and cranky.  I sometimes wondered if it was worth it, especially the next summer, when one year-old Ellie started every morning of our week-long beach trip well before 5 a.m.  

Amy Julia Becker describes this phenomenon well in her recent post entitled "When Summer Vacation is Hard."  She's right about pretty much all of it:  the high expectations we have for vacationing with our children, the difficult reality of traveling with babies and toddlers, the increasing pay-offs as children age.  

What Becker doesn't address, however, is what those of us with small children are supposed to do about this, besides look forward to the days when our children are older.  Do we, as one of my Facebook friends suggested in response to the article, skip the family vacation and spend our money on a couples trip sans kids?  Do we adjust our expectations, drink extra coffee, and hope for the best?  Do we just stay home?

All are valid choices, even good choices.  There is wisdom in recognizing the limitations of this season of life and not investing a lot of money and energy on vacations that are far from restful.  

But, fresh off a weekend trip to the beach with another family, well aware of the burdens of vacationing with a toddler and a baby, or in this case, two toddlers and two babies, I'd like to suggest another approach: embracing the realities of stressful car rides and sandy bath tubs and dinners where no one gets to finish a sentence, choosing to believe that the chaos and the extra work and the missed sleep are all, in fact, worth it.

They are worth it, in part, because my three year-old can now appreciate and remember the experience. She is old enough to spend a blissful day at the beach digging and splashing and sipping juice boxes, and her delight is mine too, a delight worth the days of laundry, packing, and driving that made those few happy hours possible.

But there's more than that.  Vacationing with kids is worth it because it is real, because in the clash between expectation and reality, desire and duty, our truest selves emerge.  We receive the gift of seeing ourselves and others as we really are:  in our pajamas, before coffee, before make-up, when our toddler was up in the middle of the night and our baby is screaming for breakfast.  It isn't always pretty, but it is how real relationships are made.  

When I think back on this weekend, on the other trips we've taken with our kids and other friends and family members, I can think of many of these real moments:  of tantrums and snappy comments and tension and occasional outright arguments.  They've often felt like the moments that need to be endured in hopes of getting to the good stuff:  the post-bedtime ice cream and pleasant conversations, the laughter.  

Don't get me wrong.  I'd rather it all be easy and fun.  But I can look back and see that I know my family and friends better, that our relationships are deeper, because I took my kids on vacation with them. 

In a culture where so much of what we call relating happens virtually, via status updates and filtered images, there is real value, I think, in doing life together for a few days, even and perhaps especially when doing life involves the ceaselessly hard and very real work of caring for small children.  

Thirty Pieces of My Thirty Years #21: Bethany Beach

On the East Coast, or at least in the mid-Atlantic region where I grew up, going on a family beach vacation is a summer ritual right up there with baseball games, ice cream cones, and flip-flops. In Pennsylvania, where I spent my childhood, most families favor Ocean City, Maryland or the Jersey and Delaware shores. In Virginia, where I live now, the Outer Banks seems to be the favored destination.

For our family though, "the beach" has always meant one place - Bethany Beach, Delaware. For years, we rented a place there for a week each summer, and then when I was in high school, my grandparents bought a bayside cottage that I've visited at least once almost every year since, with family, and with friends from college, church small groups, and work.

While I've been to beaches in Maryland, New Jersey, Canada, California, Florida, Hawaii, and the Caribbean, it's hard for me to think of visits to those places, as amazingly beautiful as most of them are, as a true beach vacation. For in the same way that home, with its familiar, well-worn rhythms and rituals, is uniquely comforting, thirty years of trips to Bethany Beach has made it feel like vacation in a way that no other place does.

Part of that is its steadiness throughout the many changes in my own life. Sure, as my dad is quick to lament, dunes now prevent beachgoers from sitting under the boardwalk, and new, trendier restaurants like Five Guys and Baja Beach House have sprung up in recent years. But it is still a small beach, a family beach, and today, like twenty years ago, there are still the quaint, book-lined shelves of Bethany Beach Bookstore, the greasy comfort of Grotto's Pizza, and salt and vinegar laden DB Fries in their signature yellow paper tub.

But perhaps even more important to my conception of Bethany Beach as my vacation spot, it is a place that holds a lifetime of my memories, beginning with childhood visits to the rental house with the spiral staircase. Our family friends the Mellingers often joined us there, all six of us children crammed in the back seat of a station wagon at the end of each long beach day, sun-kissed and sandy, surrounded by piles of towels, beach pails, and boogie boards. When we weren't on the beach, there were bike rides on the boardwalk, endless games of pool and the card game War, and half-hearted attempts to fish and crab in the brown canal waters behind the house. And more often than not, my birthday happened that week, simple homemade chocolate sheetcake and candles, perhaps a present or two, surrounded by family and the closest of family friends. Pure happiness.

My teen memories of the beach are more introverted ones, long, lazy days of reading for pleasure, naps in the sunshine, shopping at the outlets on rainy days, people watching on the boardwalk. A welcome respite from honors classes, track practice, and college applications.

Then, for several years in college, my friends and I descended on my grandparents' beach house the week after exams for what at the time felt like the ultimate experience of community life: Techmo Bowl tournaments, National Geographic puzzle marathons that lasted until 2 a.m., puppy chow making sessions, football and frisbee on the still empty spring beach, laughter, and long conversations about life, love, the ever-looming future. Sweet moments of friendship, of life on the exciting cusp between adolescence and adulthood.

In recent years, the beach has become a place to both retreat from and explore the complexities of an ever-changing life. It is a place where CJ and my sister-in-laws have become, in a deeper sense, family. It is a place where I've gathered with friends to retreat, to pray, to fellowship, and in one case, to grieve. It is the place where I cuddled my baby niece while pondering the early days of the small life growing inside of me, the place where morning sickness first made me run to the toilet. Rich times, painful times, deepening times.

The future, as always, is uncertain. My grandparents are aging, and what might become of the beach house remains unclear. CJ and I are starting a family, and what sort of family vacation traditions we might institute with our own children are yet to be decided. I don't know if I'll spend as much time at Bethany Beach in the next 30 years as I have in the past 30. But I do know that I'm grateful for the gift of a home away from home, a place that has been the backdrop for so many scenes in so many seasons of my life, a place that will always be the storehouse for so many special memories.