Posts tagged " family vacation "

On Carefree Vacations

March 28th, 2016 Posted by Tabula Rasa No Comment yet

I’ve dared to go on vacation three times since my son was born. By vacation I don’t mean my husband and I carousing around the streets of a foreign city, sleeping till noon, laying on a beach with a book in hand. I mean those vacations that we take with our young children. The ones where you come back completely exhausted, with a constant ringing noise in your head, and at least five sudden loads of laundry to add to the other existing five. The ones where you’ve spent hours trying to convince your child that restaurants are for eating and chairs are for sitting and that mommy, like all others, needs to eat, not run to the neighboring playground for five minutes every five minutes, while stuffing a piece of bread in her mouth. The ones where the beach becomes a crossfit class; dig sand, haul water, make a castle, carry 45-pound toddlers into the water, swim with them on your back or around your neck, haul them back out of the water. Pick up wet sandy towels, pack them in a bag, carry toddler through sand because you can’t bear cleaning the scary, yucky sand full of critters off his feet one more time. The vacations that by the time the sun sets and the wine comes out, you have to decide whether you should put on your pyjamas and brush your teeth before you have a glass in case of sudden sleep. Yes, sudden sleep, it can happen anywhere, anytime. The ones where your husband finally gets a word in because the kids are asleep, touches your hand and your immediate reaction is to violently slap it away, because if anyone touches you again before tomorrow morning, you will scream. The ones where you’re woken in the middle of the night to go play because someone is so excited to be in new surroundings, where this someone goes and wakes up everyone else in the house after you ignore them, including the poor couple that came along with you, babies, possible neighbors, dogs, donkeys, you name it, it’s woken. And then a day starts all over again.

“Family friendly,” the ads to hotels and rentals say. There is no such thing. There’s always a cliff, a thorn, a huge spider, a dock, a tall bed, a deep sea, a something. But hey, when you’re home and almost back to normal state of exhaustion a week or so later, think back, look at the pictures of their smiling faces, fascinated by the cricket they saw, the little fish in the water, the sunrise they watched in your arms. Try not to etch all these images into your mind, for soon they will be gone, and you’ll be begging for just one more family vacation.

Pieces: a novel

“Pieces” is the winner of the silver medal at the 2017 Independent Publishers Awards (IPPY), and a finalist at the USA Best Book Awards and International Book Awards.

When Clouds Embrace: a children's book

All proceeds from the sales of "When Clouds Embrace" will go to Giving for Greece, a foundation that works to help the hundreds of unaccompanied refugee minors in Greece.