Category Archives: Living Well

Thoughts about how to be an honorable person.

Just Time Away, or Time Off?

Our main trip of the summer this year was, in many ways, one of our all-time simplest:  No passports.  No airlines.  No complicated series of hotel reservations.  No list of sights to see.  Instead, we opted for a 4-hour drive to Ocean City, Maryland, and a week in an oceanfront condo.  The goal for the week:  Relax.

Reflecting upon a good week of family time, I see several decisions that helped with the Relax goal and that I’ll carry forward as a contract with myself for our next big trip:

The I-Word.  Consider, if you will:

  • My wife’s work is heavily reliant upon the internet, and some of her deadlines do not flex around vacations.
  • The school system which provides my own gainful employment–allowing for luxuries such as vacations, food, and a roof over our heads–expects me to be reasonably responsive to email contacts, even when I am on leave.
  • I also have another [absolutely not gainful] pursuit:  this blog.

We did decide to pay for an available wi-fi service, but we chose to buy access for only one device at a time.  Mrs. DKB carved out the time she needed for her work, and I managed to leave her laptop alone all week.  Sure, I checked Twitter/Facebook/etc. on my phone throughout the week, but for fun–not because I had to.

Breaking with tradition, I limited my work email to a maximum of a quick check in the morning and another in the late afternoon, and I triaged new messages into ‘no worries until sometime next week,’ ‘flagged for priority when we get home,’ and ‘respond today’–which only applied to the absolute musts that my ‘out-of-office’ auto-reply could not defer.  Out of dozens of messages, remarkably only one made the cut for an immediate reply.

My blog sat idle all week.  Since I do not have thousands of visitors per day…yet?…the internet seems to have continued on without noticing; but I am extremely hopeful that the same people who would have read this new post last week will read it now.

Honor The Traditions.  We have visited this beach town many times, sometimes for a full week, and sometimes for a long weekend.  My wife and I even went there pre-kids, sometimes in the middle of winter.  So we have picked up many traditions over 20+ years:  a particular family-run ice cream shop; sand castle construction; the boogie board; a favorite pizza place; volleyball; ‘scopes’ pictures on the beach; dinner at a restaurant with tables on the sand, a few feet from baywater; the ever-popular mini-golf; trying to get a kite in the air; whatever book one of us might have been “saving for the beach”;…and the list goes on.

During the week, we managed to work in everything on everyone’s “But we always ____!” list except for the mini-golf–which I can rectify at a ‘course’ nearby now that we are home.

Ease Up on the Penny Pinching.  I’m not afraid to spend money on family fun, but I like to save where I can.  If something we use is available at Costco, the 6-month supply size is my first choice, preferably during a month when that product is in the coupon book.  If we are headed to an amusement park, it is a point of pride for me to find a discount code.  Before many vacations I have been known to scour the internet for weeks to secure the next-to-impossible hotel rate or airfare.  But once we’re “on the ground” for a vacation, I’ve found that fewer members of my family want to hurt me if I back off a little on the money front.

In my own mind, we freed up more money this year for meals and snacks by outfitting the condo with groceries.  Everyone enjoyed both sides of that equation:  We had some menu food, but we also had a hot, homemade breakfast in the apartment each morning and beach-friendly lunches in a cooler under the umbrella most days.  Still, meals are only one type of expense, which leads me to…

Empower the Kids to Spend Their Own Money.  Our kids have an outstanding income source:  their grandparents.  Whenever we are headed out of town, both grandfathers like to present each child with some spending money.  So souvenirs, trips to the candy shop, etc.–anything that one of the kids wants but that is not part of meals or full-family activities–are their own purchases.

It’s amazing how much more frugal and savvy a 9, 13, or 16 year old becomes when the money is coming from his or her own wallet.

Don’t Overload (or allow others to overload) Our Schedule  As a family, we are skilled enough at over-committing ourselves, but when traveling with others it is that much easier for the vacation to become busier than regular life at home.  And on this trip we were staying in the same building as my wife’s parents and her sister’s family.

We spent plenty of time with grandparents, aunt & uncle, and cousins during the week, but we also preserved our own family time.  We opted out of a few early dinners (the norm for all of the in-laws) to stay on the beach well after the lifeguards had left for the day–We enjoy that.  It’s more peaceful and quite a bit cooler with the sun dropping behind the condo, some of our favorite beach time.  Instead of joining the relatives in the evening, we stayed in for a quiet dinner for 5 and the Olympics on TV.

It’s telling that our 13 year old commented as we left for home that “it was nice not to be rushing to get to reservations every night this year.”  Mouths of babes?

So It’s a Deal.  My goal for our next vacation is to keep the “off” in “time off” and to remember the trite “working vacation” oxymoron….which reminds me of the time I used the term oxymoron in an English classroom and one of my students actually raised his hand to ask, “Did you just call someone in here a dumb cow?”  But that’s a story for another time.

Note:  To be clear, the opinions expressed in this post are my own.  DadKnowsBetter has not been compensated, encouraged, or otherwise influenced to mention or promote any place, business, or activity in this post.  Neither have I been coerced or threatened not to mention our extended family–yet.

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Filed under Living Well, Places to Go, Vacation & Travel

Going With The Change-up This Summer

During the last few summers, our family’s schedule has often felt as busy as the school year.  But this year we have prioritized our commitments, streamlined the summer calendar, and found ourselves with actual down-time once in a while.

In the past, theme camps at the local health club, rec center, and community college have allowed our kids to delve into piracy, dinosaurs, odd science, etc.  Sports camps have fed their soccer and volleyball skills; in fact, volleyball has included travel club camps, high school booster camps, skills-specific camps, and even a ‘college showcase’ camp.  A major challenge with the camps is deciding who should go where, and when.  If 3 kids have 3 camps in 3 different places, the logistics are crazy.  But if we spread them out to different weeks, summer travel becomes as hard to schedule as trips during the school year.  The kids had plenty of good experiences over the years, but it was time for a little different schedule.

This year?  Our rising high school junior has assisted for a week at her coach’s booster camp, and she may attend another camp as a player to sharpen up before school tryouts.  For our camps this summer–as Tony Kornheiser might say–‘That’s it.  That’s the list.’ 

But no one is exactly sitting around our house wondering what to do until we head out of town for a vacation.  Here are a few examples:

  • In our 9th year on the team at our local pool, swimming remains an important part of summer life.  It is the favorite activity for our 13 year old–practicing the early shift–and a favorite for her 9 year old brother–practicing at 9:00.  This schedule gives each day a balance of consistent structure to start off followed by freedom from 10:00 on.  (Alas, their older sister retired from swimming this year, but she will grudgingly admit that much of her success in volleyball over the years was made possible by the muscle she added to her once-skinny frame through all of those years in the pool.)
  • School workbooks and assigned reading:  chores or good times?  It’s all a question of attitude.  We’re going for ‘good times’ this summer, and there should be no August rush to get everything done.
  • I am teaching the ex-swimmer how to drive.  That’s certainly……interesting.
  • Driving range.  With 2 kids who want to learn how to play golf, taking turns hitting a few shots in a row turned this into a great hour–at a bargain price.
  • Books for the sake of books.  This afternoon my son and I settled in for some quality reading time.  He went with a book ironically called The Name of This Book is Secret, while I worked through a few chapters of Hemingway.  (Once an English teacher….)  What could be better than an afternoon read in a cool living room on a 95 degree day?
  • We’ve also found time for foosball.  Wii.  Building a robot duck.  (Seriously.)  Extra time at the pool, without laps or stopwatches.  Time with grandparents.  Some pretty wild squirtguns that I wish were around when I was a kid.  Tending a neighbor’s dog.  An occasional episode of the original Star Trek series.  (After a year, we are just over half-way through, so it’s a perfect time to pick up the pace).  The time fills itself–so far with plenty of good things.

Hopefully we will be a little more rested and ready this year when the school year starts off again at the end of August.  But either way, we are enjoying the change-up.

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Filed under Activities & Sports, Holidays, Living Well, Places to Go

An Empty Day on the Calendar

Last weekend something rare happened. 

5 columns on the family calendar–one for each member of the family:  All blank.  No volleyball tournament.  No swim meet.  No lacrosse/soccer/fill-in-the-blank practice.  No tutoring.  No lessons.  No meetings.  No dinner obligation with extended family for a birthday or holiday.   

All of our usual events have important places in the life we lead.  Getting up at 6:00am or earlier on a weekend morning for an all-day sports event can be painful, but the kids–and, once we get there, the parents–enjoy them.  Practice schedules complicate life, but the kids are healthier in countless ways because of the activities they have chosen.  Tutoring?  Family?  Obviously they are priorities.  So, like most families we know, we are used to being fairly busy 7 days a week.

S.O.S.

But life needs a few sleeping in days now and then.  Toys and games deserve some attention outside of school vacation weeks.   The basketball hoop in the driveway wants a few shots once in a while.  And our family calendar needs a little more blank space.

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Filed under Activities & Sports, Living Well