Spring Break (Part II): Big Family

Spring Break (Part II): Big Family

Vacation is different with kids. 

I understand the banality of this statement.  As a matter of fact, I sat here for a number of minutes trying to think of something, anything, better to say.  But really, that’s about the sum of it.  The things we do, the people we see…the focus of each and every activity…is different.  Part of the reason for this is obvious and did not come to me as a surprise.  It is no longer about me and my “entertainment,” whether it is a camping excursion or a trip to the beach or just time to decompress at home with the television.  The focus has switched from me to the kids.  This isn’t an epiphany.  I knew that would be the case a long time ago.  I knew this when I saw how stressed out my folks got on vacation when I was a kid.  I actually remember telling myself, after a particularly long trip to the gulf coast, that vacations for parents must suck.  My parents didn’t really do anything except listen to us want things.  An overpriced tourist tee shirt with a wildly inappropriate slogan on it (something about eating a worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle and how I was “slippery when ‘et”).  A lanyard with a shark’s tooth on it.  Sand dollars in a bag.  Some we got, some we didn’t.  And I was always on the lookout for one of those switchblade combs.  I don’t know why.  I mean, for most of the summer I had a buzz cut (yes, a little fat kid with a buzz cut on an Alabama beach…one of about ten million on the Redneck Riviera).  Yet I couldn’t get over the idea of having one.  I kept imagining going up to some kid, whipping it out and brandishing it in his face.  Then I’d hit the button so the comb would snap into place, but turned so the other kid would see it edge on, momentarily making him think it actually was a knife.  And then I’d laugh, casually turn it so he could see the comb teeth, and cooly run it through my hair (which didn’t exist) then walk away. 

Stupid. 

I guess I thought having a switchblade comb would make me a badass or someone from that movie The Outsiders. 

Stay golden, Tubby Pony Boy. 

Anyway, I also remember my folks actually spending time with us and seeming to be, for the most part, happy about it.  They never really got to do anything they wanted to.  They didn’t go out to dinner by themselves, at least not that I can remember.  They didn’t buy themselves anything from the “cool” shops along the beach.  They just walked slowly alongside us, alternately saying “yes” and “no” to our immediate and transient wants, seeming a little aloof about it all.    

After a long day on the beach and walking around in town, we’d get back to the hotel room exhausted, ready to pass out even before the sun went down.  My brother, sister and I would sit in the air conditioning and watch a movie on the hotel’s free HBO, sandy yet comfortable, nursing mild sunburns or jellyfish stings, indifferent to the view of the graying ocean beyond the window behind us. 

We were quiet. 

And Mom and Dad would be outside on the deck, looking at the waves.

How in the HELL could that have been fun?     

Rather than get into a drawn out (and honestly, probably pretty boring) chronology of our vacation, I’ll hit the heavy hitters where funny or at least eye-opening experiences occurred.

1.  Free Breakfast

At the crack of dawn that first morning, the girls were bouncing off the walls at the idea of the breakfast waiting for them downstairs.  I don’t know what they were picturing.  Somehow they got it into their minds that it was going to be the most spectacular feast ever to be lain upon a table.  We tried to tell them that there really wasn’t anything that special about hotel breakfasts.  But it didn’t matter.  They had seen that damn waffle iron sitting in the little dining room the night before and were just chomping at the bit to put it to use. 

Before groggily heading down to the food, I asked if they were excited about going up into the mountains, as tubing at Winter Park was that day’s activity.  They shrugged, said sure, then told me to hurry up because they wanted to see the waffle iron. 

The grand results of mighty tectonic forces that have been molding the earth’s surface for eons upon eons? The way each peak is a monument to how truly special and unique our planet is?  To stand humbled and dwarfed among God’s vast beauty, to feel frighteningly insignificant yet overwhelmingly grateful to have a place on this earth, at this time, given this life…

Or…

A waffle iron?

They chose the waffle iron.

The girls waited, undeterred, twenty minutes for the family who had arrived just before us to figure out the iron.  I mean, I don’t want to go on some grumpy rant here about how dumb people are, because it only makes me look like an elitist creep, but…Oh, God, people are so very, very dumb.  I mean, come on.  Fill the cup with batter, pour it on the iron at the center, close the lid, AND TURN THE GODDAMNED THING OVER!!!!  I watched a fat woman in a dirty sweatshirt stare at this thing for three full minutes with her mouth open, just wondering why the counter hadn’t started yet.  I guess the growing amount of smoke wasn’t enough of a hint that she had done something wrong.  And the instructions are printed and posted right next to the thing.  So I said,

“You need to flip the iron over before it will start.”

  “Huh?”

“Flip the thing over and the counter will start.”

She proceeded to open the lid and pry at the half-burned waffle with a fork, apparently believing I had meant that she needs to flip the actual waffle over.

“No…no, you have to…here, let me.”  I closed the lid, rotated the iron, and the timer started.

“Ooooooh, okay.  Thanks.”

“No problem.”

After two minutes of everyone staring at the single breakfast machine, grumpy and hungry, the beeper goes off, and she’s stumped again.

“Open it up, take out the waffle.”

“Huh?”

Finally she figured it out, but then we had to go through the same thing with four other members of her brood, who had apparently learned nothing from the previous family member.  As I’m getting more and more pissed and the girls are getting hungrier and hungrier, I realized how very primal this whole little hotel waffle maker experience is.  Like a watering hole on the Serengeti or something.  It is the great socio-economic equalizer.  Doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, how important you believe you are…you’re eventually going to be a schmuck standing in line waiting for a fat lady in a grungy Arkansas Razorback sweatshirt to figure out a damned waffle iron.

Lessons learned from this:  Kids love breakfast; they don’t give a shit about geology or tectonic forces; and some grad student should write a sociology thesis on hotel waffle makers.

2.  Function versus beauty

In short, kids don’t care one bit about beauty or existential experiences.  Amy and I are fine just drinking a beer and looking at the mountains.  But the girls…well, they think the mountains are great, but what can they do with them?  How can they play with them?  To a kid, the vacation has to be functional.  They have to physically do something.  So we planned some activities, which went well.  When we went tubing up at Winter Park, the girls were bored out of their skulls driving up to the mountains, but when they found they could slide down them at 50 mph on tubes, well, they liked them just fine.  By contrast, I was over the whole tubing thing after about four runs, at which point I wanted to go into the bar, get some food, and just…chill…out.  A moment of peace and quiet.  And it was at this point I remembered my parents standing out on the deck behind our hotel on the beach.

 Just…staring. 

They were having fun because they weren’t doing anything at all.  Nothing.  And it was everything they hoped it could be.  In six days of vacation, we kids took up 5.95 days of vacation; they got 0.05 days.  But it was enough for them.  And oddly, Amy and I found that it was enough for us as well.

3.  Big Family

In the last post, the girls were about to meet their “Big Family.”  We thought we were using this as a term of endearment, a testament to the love we have for the people we were visiting.  Everyone was uncle and aunt so-and-so or cousin whomever.  And as much as our affection for these people was the driving force for our phrasing, it was also just plain laziness.  “Cousin Maya” puts the whole thing to bed and does not require any further explanation.  However, if we were to introduce someone simply by their first name, the girls would demand to know that person’s entire genealogy.  And if we told them all the ins and outs of our friendships, who was who, who met who when, whose kid is whose, etc etc etc, they’d only barely grasp it and then ask the same questions each time that person was mentioned.  So “Cousin Maya” it is.  The girls were STOKED to meet all these new people, which they did throughout the week.  We went to the zoo with a friend and her two little ones, which was a lot of fun.  But I did have the realization that every single situation in the kids’ lives is somehow related and compared to a Disney movie.  So, in the zoo, you guessed it, they found every single animal they saw in The Lion King and were mesmerized by them.  I mean, of course the lion.  Who wouldn’t care to see a lion?  But a warthog?  The girls were blown away by this wild pig just walking around, giggling at it and singing the hula song “he’s a big pig you can be a big pig too! Yup yup yup.”  But in any animal that didn’t have a line in that movie they weren’t in the bit least interested.  The primate house was a hit, the bird house just smelled bad.  All in all, if you’re in Denver with kiddos, I recommend the zoo, it’s pretty good.  Not all sad like some. 

As the trip went on, and as we hung out at friends’ houses where we were catching up and letting the kids run around and play, I realized that as the kids were having the time of their lives…and so were we.

You see, because Amy and I do not have children of our own, before the girls came to live with us, there was always a bit of a disconnect between us and our friends with kids.  It was simply that we were at different points in our lives.  We were still in no-kids-yet mode, wanting to go out and do adult things until the wee hours of the morning, where our friends, well, they couldn’t.  They’d jump through hoops to find babysitters and what not, and we always had a great time, but still…we were just missing something.  They were fine just hanging out with us in their barely managed chaos that was a house full of children, able to tune out the noise and screaming.  Before the girls came, we weren’t able to tune that out.  We weren’t completely at ease in that scenario.  It was great to see our friends, but it was just different.  Our vacations to see our friends revolved around children and their needs, even though we didn’t have any. 

Well, now we get it.

It was the first time where we could comfortably hang out with our friends in the midst of screaming, roughhousing kids, keeping one ear on the conversation and one ear on the bizarre world of children playing.  And you know what?  It was relaxing!  Because when the kids are together, they kind of turn into a pack of feral children, raising themselves, attending to their own needs, and we just have to make sure they don’t go all Lord of the Flies and begin killing one another.  And that, I found, is the beauty of a bunch of people with kids hanging out together.  You just set them loose in some basement room, where a startlingly complex child society takes hold with its own social norms and everything.  I mean, one could walk down there, see a pack of kids all dressed in weird tribal clothing and loin cloths dancing around a fire and we’d just say, “hey, be careful” and head up to stand in the kitchen and drink beer.  Occasionally some sweaty kid will come running up and ask a cryptic question like, “can we get down the vacuum cleaner and have a bunch of pennies?”  The answer to this is usually, “Well, why…I mean…whatever.  Just don’t get hurt.”  Because if you actually engage this question, nine times out of ten you’ll get some halting, out-of-breath explanation that doesn’t make any sense anyway.  So just let ‘em go, make sure they don’t drop a rock on the kid with glasses, and retreat to the kitchen for some long-awaited grown up conversation.

We had such a party the last night of our trip.  Amy and I thought having a good old fashioned white trash hotel party would be a hell of a lot of fun, so our friends Kipp and Trayce came down with their three kids and rented a room as well.  Other friends with their kids came by at different points too.  We got pizza, Taco Bell, McDonalds, and a shit-ton of Keystone Ice. 

It was magic. 

Kids running around half naked and screaming between different pockets of the same big party (half of the people were usually in the pool while the other half were upstairs talking), all of us having a really good time.  Probably my favorite part of the entire event was Kipp’s daughter Kennedy.  She’s the youngest of three, and just trudges around silently, watching, waiting, smiling.  In the pool she would just sit in her floaty thing and kick around as silently as a duck.  Occasionally someone would ask if she was okay and she’d just grin, turn, and kick away.  When she’d begin to say something, I’d tell everyone to be quiet, that Kennedy was about to actually speak.  Then she’d just smile and walk away.  Now when she does talk, it’s assertive.  She’d get knocked down from time to time, but usually she’d just get back up, smile, and keep at whatever it was the other kids were doing.  Other times she would say, “HEY!” and that was enough for everyone to stop and immediately address her needs.  Pretty good way to operate really.  Don’t say much, but when you do, by God make it count.

All in all, it was a fantastic spring break for all of us.  I doubt the girls have ever had so many people make a fuss over them at once, and being total attention hogs, they loved every single second of it.  Amy and I definitely grew a little and had a nice reconnection with all our old friends.  It’s like we’re in “the club” now, and while it’s nice for me, I know Amy was having a hard time with that aspect, and I believe this was her best spring break in a long, long time.