We were only a few hours into our family beach vacation, and already I was questioning whether we should have come. “It’s just four nights, we can get through this,” I told myself, as if we were in some sort of survival situation instead of in a beautiful house on the ocean.
My daughter was screaming from her pack n’ play instead of napping, and my husband and son were informing me that the weather for the next few days looked iffy. I had no idea what we would do if we were trapped inside all day.
When I booked the vacation for us, I knew it wouldn’t be 100 percent relaxing. Traveling with kids rarely is. Which is why we usually visit the grandparents—they are fun to be with and they help us take care of the kids. But this year I was determined to have a family vacation at the beach—I wanted to recreate for my children the same memories I had of childhood summers spent by the ocean.
I found what I thought was the perfect house in Charlestown, Rhode Island. It was right on the beach, so it was easy to shuttle the kids back and forth for naps and bathroom-runs, and my husband and I could still enjoy the ocean once the kids were in bed. I spent a full week packing, making sure we had all the beach toys and art projects and snacks we’d need. I brought three novels for myself and told my husband to make sure to bring his crossword puzzles. I imagined the kids playing for hours in the sand while my husband and I drank beers and gazed out at the ocean, occasionally getting up from our beach chairs to help the kids put a finishing touch on their sandcastles.
That first day there, my 18-month-old daughter spent the entire morning trying to walk back up the beach to the house. Every time she turned around and saw the ocean, she’d point her finger and it and wail: “No!’ My 4-year-old son, after playing in the sand for just an hour, started complaining that we were spending “too much time outside.”
“Wow, what a great vacation!” my husband exclaimed, throwing his arms up into the air in mock glee.
“We knew it wouldn’t be perfect,” I said to him. “So let’s just try to make the best of it.”
I quickly realized that my experience of the vacation improved once I stopped expecting that our life would be any different just because we were at the beach. My kids would still whine and get in fights and my husband and I would still get annoyed—the fact that the Atlantic Ocean was 10 feet away wasn’t going to change that.
Later that morning, my daughter fell asleep on an impromptu walk in the stroller–she was overtired from traveling–and my son discovered the bunk bed in his room, and from there things improved.
I started to find that–even though it wasn’t exactly easy–being on vacation was more special than just being at home. Amidst the never-ending challenges of dealing with two kids were little pockets of vacation bliss. One afternoon, my daughter spent a half hour gleefully chasing a bird up the beach, while I followed behind and watched her make tiny footprints in the sand. During a particularly beautiful sunset, my husband and son took popsicles down to the beach and stomped in the surf, pretending they were dinosaurs. One day we took the kids to the Vanderbilt mansion in Newport and actually got to listen to five minutes of the audio tour before the kids had to head outside to burn off some energy (which wasn’t terrible, because the mansion had a gigantic, manicured front yard that overlooked the ocean).
On our last night there, we all went out to dinner, and my family did a cheers. “To a wonderful family vacation,” I exclaimed, and we all clinked glasses—my kids with their milks and my husband and I with our margaritas. It was the perfect end to the trip (until 10 minutes later when our dinner deteriorated into high-pitched screaming before we had even finished our appetizers).
Later that evening, when the kids were in bed, I downloaded the pictures from our vacation and made them into a little slideshow. Reliving our vacation after it was over was like looking back on one’s birth experience several years after the fact–you remember the beauty of it more than you do the pain.
On the car ride back to our house the next day, I asked my husband if he thought we should come back next year.
“Maybe if we can get some other people to come with us,” he offered.
“Do you miss the beach?” I asked my son the next day at home. “I do not miss the beach,” he told me.
I rolled my eyes. Still, I think we’ll go back next year.
Leah Black is the former executive editor of New York Family. She and her husband are the proud parents of Avi and Lily.
