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Overabundance With Our Feet on the Ground

This weekend we snuck out of town for some family time. Since we’d unplugged Jane from her friends it seemed only fair to take the family funishment to the next level and make her spend quality time with us. We had a blast.

What was interesting about this trip is that we stayed in a hotel I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t one I’d recommend. It wasn’t budget friendly, and no matter how much I lowered my expectations they simply couldn’t be met by the hotel staff. They were a friendly staff, adorable even, but they weren’t particularly competent.

We told the kids we were heading to San Diego and my son packed for the beach. I don’t know how we didn’t double check his clothing choices, but we didn’t and he ended up with shorts and tee shirts and not enough socks. Although San Diego is, in fact, the beach, it was February in San Diego and it was quite cool at night. Jane’s hair wasn’t behaving as she thought it should (though I maintain that she has the most incredible hair I’ve ever seen).

With all this, with not very interesting food, cold and windy nights, waiting until 9pm for a bed to be made (and by “made” I mean it had no sheets) and Mr. G’s back hurting him it sounds like a horrible weekend away. Don’t worry, it’s only a sound.

Jane finished book seven in Pretty Little Liars and we had to beg the bookstore owner to please let us in, “we don’t need to browse.” I explained, my foot wedged into the closing door. We just want to grab a book and go. A toddler was in the back pooping in her diaper under a table, her father thought it was adorable. We got a book and Jane had a dose of birth control all at once.

During this weekend I was reading, obsessively reading, The Man Who Quit Money. It’s about Daniel Suelo who quit money in the beginning of the millennium. It’s a fabulous book and it touched me because it was written by a man with whom who I grew up. I still make his mother’s pancakes from the Co-Op nursery school cookbook. Obviously I wanted to like this book, but somewhere midway I realized it was me. He was writing about me (and so many of you) when he talked about the dilemma of reusing a Ziploc bag. Is it worth the water to rinse it? Am I adding to the plastic in the landfill? Why the fuck did I buy this bag in the first place? To hold apple slices? Next time I’m sending the kids to school with an apple and a knife (braces make it impossible to bite into one whole).

The book might have made me nicer over the weekend. There was only one moment where I lost my cool with the hotel manager (who was approximately 15 years old). I looked at things a little differently. It didn’t matter how I wanted to see the world. It didn’t matter what I expected a resort to look like, it mattered that I was with my family and I was gifted time and attention.

In fact Monday morning Alexander looked up at me and said that even though it’s a bay and not a beach and even though and even though… this was the best weekend of his entire life.

I’m not sure why our family is having such a nice time just being together. I’ll never really know how a crappy hotel and terrible food gave us all such pleasure, but it did.

10 thoughts on “Overabundance With Our Feet on the Ground”

    1. It’s K-8 with 300 kids… Jane uses their kitchen knives every afternoon.
      Since they have a good teacher student ratio they still have time left in the day to think critically. It’s refreshing, no?

  1. Just wanted to say how much I enjoy your voice, always. I’m glad y’all had some great family time. 

    We went away together just the four of us too, and we almost didn’t go, because I thought, “We can just be together at home,” but I know if we’d stayed home, we’d have all had our separate pursuits. It’s good to be thrown together sometimes.

  2. I’ll have to read that book.  I’ve done battle with Ziploc bags and lost.  I washed them and reused them for over a year and had the same internal monologue and eventually just gave up.  Also, your friend’s book seems relevant to what I’m studying right now.  Interdisciplinary education has a strong anti-establishment footing.  I look forward to reading it!

  3. Loved this post Jessica. Especially loved the part about the toddler pooping under the table because my son used to do that when he was still in diapers. Weekends like this are what it’s all about. (And that definitely sounds like a book I need to read – I wash my ziploc bags and my kids groan because I sent them to school with their dried fruit in washed out salsa containers.)

    Oh, and get yourself a Pampered Chef apple slicer – it’s the bomb (and even has its own cover!)

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