I’m really lucky to have a family healthy enough for travel, to have time off to do so, and enough physical safety and financial security to be able to contemplate a vacation. Like all of you, I spend way too much time reading the news, and I know that most people aren’t so lucky. So it only seems right to celebrate our good fortune in the home of celebrating good fortune: Greece. The next three weeks are going to be spent drinking wine, eating olives, and looking out on the sea where it all began.
Or at least that’s how I’m imagining it. In reality, that glass of wine is going to take three hours to finish, in between changing diapers and chasing a two year old away from priceless antiquities.
Speaking of the two year old, we learned in Viet Nam that jet lag is tough on toddlers, but brutal on their parents. Mimi, I love you, but I don’t want to sing Yellow Submarine again, it’s 3 am. So to shorten the adjustment time once we get there, I’ve started moving Mimi’s schedule up an hour a day this week. Which means I needed to find a way to keep a toddler busy at 4:30 am todaythat didn’t result in waking up her infant brother. Not easy.
The first fifteen minutes were easy. The natural response for a two year old that was woken up two hours before the sunrise is to stand still and stare at the floor. I definitely exploited that.
In all fairness, I didn’t look much better. But I’m the parent, so I get to hold the camera.
Eventually, a certain degree of loopiness set in, and we needed to get outside.
Thankfully, Mimi’s indiscriminate cackling didn’t attract any coyotes or birds of prey, and we were able to hang out on the driveway for a few minutes and look at the stars. And by a few minutes, I meant ten seconds. The toddler was awake. So like any self respecting parent with a toddler that wants to run around at 5 am, I secured her with a five-point harness in the back seat of our car.
But where does one go at 5 am with a two year old? Thankfully, we’re down in Tucson staying with my parents, so we have a few more options than we do up in Whiteriver. A city park bought us about 30 minutes of swings, slides, and “horsey rides.”
Once the sun was up, we had a few more options. The grocery and hardware stores bought my sleeping wife and infant another hour. And there’s no need for false humility about my next move. It was an out of the park home run of dadding. We picked up a dozen donuts and took them to the local fire station.
Winning.
Mike and the guys of TFD Station #16 were far nicer than they needed to be at the crack of dawn. They must have seen the desperation in my eyes. Public servants, through and through.
Speaking of my wife and infant child, that’s why we’re hitting the road when we are. It’s pretty hard for Aimee and I both to line up significant amounts of time off together. But about six months ago, Aimee turned to me and said, “I’ll already be off for three months, why don’t we go on a trip? No sense wasting all of my maternity at home.” She’s a keeper.
Our son, Quinn, is nearly two months old and has his first round of vaccines behind him. Seems like a reasonable time to get a passport.
As for the location, Greece seemed easy enough to do with a couple of kids, but hard enough to make it worth doing. Plus, our good friends Nona and Grael went there with their toddler last year, and made it sound delightful and kid-friendly. And being that we tend to eat our way through a country, Greece seemed even more enticing.
We leave first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll need to come up with a few more things to do with a toddler during the pre-dawn hours, but that’s a small price to pay. As always, we couldn’t be more excited.
