While on our recent break, I caught up on a lot of reading – and one of the things that resonated most with me was a Real Simple magazine article I came across. In the piece, a mom-traveler told the nightmarish story of trying to get home after a week-long ski trip with her husband and two children (a 6-year-old and a baby): Their flight home was cancelled due to a winter storm, they were rebooked for a flight three days later, and then that flight was cancelled. Finally they decided to just rent a car and make the 14-hour drive home themselves.

The mom, like I would have done, freaked out through most of each step of the ordeal but later realized she got a lot out of the experience. She wrote:

And when I thought about it, I could hardly believe this: how wonderful it had been. How, after days of being miserable because I was trying so hard to stick to the established plan, the thing that had saved us in the end was changing course, and taking a different road – literally. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a revelation, but for me, someone who puts so much stock in order and routine, it was. Our vacation had been full of incredible memories, but the long journey home, that part that I hadn’t seen coming, was the part I now cherish the most.

The story reminded me of our (admittedly much less awful) travel ordeals of last winter – when we endured a 7-hour delay when flying to see my parents for Christmas. When I look back upon that experience now, what I recall most fondly is the last bit of our trip, when the airline arranged to have a car drive us from Milwaukee to Madison. The girls’ eyes got so big when they saw the stretch limo pull out and realized it was for us, and I’ll never forget how little and cute they looked, sitting in their booster seats in that huge vehicle. Nor will I  forget the rest of that ride or how beautiful it wound up being with the snow gently coming down outside our window.

I never would have thought this was something I would cherish, but as with the mom in this story, it’s now a great memory for me. And it’s yet another reminder to try not to stress, but actually embrace, life’s small stuff (even if it doesn’t seem small in that moment).

-M

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2015 at 2:16 pm and is filed under 87. Two kids-Jan-March15. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.