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To encourage myself through the vacation wasteland of the late winter months, I often set my sights on Passover, when we spend ten days in the fabulous city of Toronto. February and March find me daydreaming about all the upcoming family togetherness – no work, no school, limited errands.

I think about all the time I will have to play with my kids because in the magical land of Canada live other responsible adults (my in-laws) who do things like make dinner and sweep the kitchen floor. I imagine lazy mornings with special breakfasts, afternoon adventures in parks or museums, and evenings full of epic games of hide-and-seek. Happiness and love, even-tempered children with snotless noses, sunshine and sleep. This is what vacation means to me.
It may surprise you not at all to learn that vacations of late have become consistently disappointing. Rather than sleeping, my children prefer to wake up super early and throughout the night so as not to miss a minute of holiday fun. They take these breaks from routine to experiment with new viruses and games such as ‘guess how much snot I can produce in only 12 hours’ (spoiler alert – enough to make you cry). It rains on vacation. Kids whine on vacation. And the whining sounds louder because of your inane expectation that you would be spending every minute with cherubic, mucus-less angels.
I began to dread vacation and the havoc it would wreak on our sleep schedules, immune systems, and whine tolerance. Enter my husband with a game-changing idea: What if we pre-ruin vacation before it can ruin itself? What if we just assume in advance that the trip will be a total bust? Instead of thinking things will be perfect and feeling let down when they are not, let’s prepare ourselves for Armageddon and be kind of psyched when it does not commence.
And like that we have reclaimed vacation in all its glory. Just as we never road trip without snacks, we now never leave the house for an extended time without first anticipating everything that will go wrong: No one will sleep. The kids will hate the food. There will be bickering. Canada will cancel fun. Inappropriate Cousin Richard will re-earn his name. We will forget our passports and be turned around at the border, or alternatively we will have to bribe a border guard by selling him one of the children (this is not a good thing. Border guards rarely want the pouty ones.). This trip will be awful and will not remind us how much we love our family.
Expect doom. And suddenly, when you don’t hit terrible traffic, things start to look up. When the kids behave decently – not angelic perhaps, but not that bad, you start to think that vacation may not be horrible. You’ll have setbacks, a rough night, or a tantrum that can only be mitigated by eating Raisinets by the fistful (that is me eating the Raisinets, by the way, I have locked the tantrumer in the dungeon), but you were expecting that, remember? You know it wouldn’t be perfect. But you can handle Inappropriate Cousin Richard because you and your kids get to fly kites and touch reptiles and play uninterrupted games of Chutes and Ladders.
Now of course you know that the only thing you dislike more than touching reptiles is playing Chutes and Ladders, but you also realize that all you really want out of vacation is to have fun with your family. (And to sleep. Is it counterproductive to dream about sleep?) Vacations are not about the annoying inevitables– the bickering and the rain; they’re about the parts the kids will remember– the kites and snakes and the day that fun was closed so you went out for ice cream instead and everyone got toppings!
Pre-ruining puts things in perspective. It helps you to stop hoping for a perfect family and start realizing that the one you have is pretty awesome. Sometimes whiny, sure, but, often funny and happy and grateful.
And when the pre-ruining falls short, well, that’s when the epic game of hide-and-seek comes in. So long as there is another adult playing (not you, Richard), I consider it fair play to hide in the car. And drive it to the ice cream store.