acting like a child

Vacation is the perfect time to act like a child - only in a wide-eyed, life-is-an-adventure kind of way. Not with temper tantrums or pouting.

In our defense - here are all the things that went wrong (on the way to the campsite.) We found ants in the camper because chore boy didn’t vacuum it out very well from the last trip. There is a random dead mouse smell for the same reason above. One boy busted a two-gallon water cooler and spilled 2/3 of the contents on the camper carpet, so we spent an hour in the Fleet Farm parking lot sopping it up with our beach towels. Our resident bloodhound smelled transmission fluid. We drove 100 miles without air conditioning in 94-degree weather because there may have been a loose wire on the alternator. And we very nearly avoided salmonella poisoning from thawed chicken breasts when we had to shut off the fridge due to the issue above.

Truth be told, in a few of these instances, we probably didn’t act like adults. Okay, in most of them. Packing four kids (okay... six) in a camper to drive 11 hours is stressful enough, but when things go wrong (which they just will), we lose our cool.

Thankfully none of the boys seem to have picked up on our low stress tolerance and are able to endure much more than we can. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches four days in a row? No problem. Listening to your older brother beat box incessantly. A little bit of a problem. But, the heat? That was a problem. Perhaps they were worn out by the sauna we were driving or their father's recollections of summers without air conditioning weren’t well received. Either way, you never saw eight eyes light up so fast when they learned we were meeting up with Grandma and Grandpa so they could ride in their air-conditioned camper the final 20 miles to the campground. All four of them were ready to ditch us.

The good news is that (tantrums aside), vacations are intended to allow you to act like a child.

You can sleep in a sleeping bag - even if you’re freezing cold or boiling hot. You can wear flip flops until someone peels off half a toe nail. You can collect rocks and steal ziplock bags from Mom to house your collection. You can go to bed late and get up early. You can hang out with your cousins and snag snacks off Grandma and Grandpa. You can go airborne on your bike. You can try to catch fireflies.

And you can do it all over tomorrow - or as long as the vacation lasts.

It’s nice to have respites like this in our too-serious, too-stressful adult lives, where we can act like kids (in more ways than one.) Besides, as one of the not-so-young-adults perceptively realized - you remember all the times when things go wrong anyway.

That’s the stuff camping trips are made of - flat tires, no air conditioning, gobbling down all-you-can-eat pizza while the camper is being fixed, enduring sunburns and gross showers and maybe even a burnt marshmallow or two. Hopefully, our children will remember things like spilled water and not that Mom and Dad had a “discussion” in the parking lot.

God grant them selective memories.