summer vacation

So! We're leaving on vacation tomorrow.  Jamaica.  Bluefields Bay.  We've been planning this trip for the past nine months.  The kids are looking forward to it.  The bags are full of beach and pool stuff.  We got all those little tiny sub-three-ounce sunscreen bottles from the travel section at Target.  We told Cal there will be fishing and sea kayaks and snorkeling.  And we told Mack we will be taking an airplane there.  (That seemed to be enough to get him going.)

I've been checking and checking and checking the weather report since earlier this week, hoping that this forecast would change (after all, I told myself on Monday, we were still almost a full week out! So much time for the clouds to dissipate!) but at this point, I may have resigned myself to this picture:

Look, I know it rains in the Caribbean all the time, so maybe it'll just rain once or twice a day, like, during the kids' naps, and...after it gets dark.  Right?  Right?  And, as Joe pointed out, a 60% chance of rain means a 40% chance of not rain, right?  RIGHT?  (You nod now.)  Look, it's not like I need it to be sunny.  I don't care if it's not sunny.  The sun and its mutagenic rays!  Do not want!  I just don't want it to be, you know, the penultimate scene in "Back To The Future" where the lightening bolt strikes the clock tower.  (In this scenario, "the clock tower" is code for "my children.")  Because Cal has been training for snorkeling on the beach, and if the ocean is going to be unswimmable, I sure don't want to be the one to tell him.

But weather aside, we're so glad to be going anyway.  That's the other piece of the work-life balance equation that doesn't get talked about too much, because it seems too obvious, but--you need to take vacation.  A real vacation, not that kind of vacation where you just stay in town and catch up on errands and tell yourself how much you don't need to relax.  Not that, but a vacation where you actually leave, go somewhere, and take yourself away from all the little distractions that take you away from spending time with your family.  

We got some fairly sobering news this week, as you may have inferred from Wednesday's entry.  A child in Mack's nursery school class passed away unexpectedly after a brief illness, which is unspeakably tragic.  And it's that kind of news, that strikes so suddenly and unexpectedly and so close to your heart--like a tree that falls down in a storm, sparing your own house but demolishing that of your neighbor--that makes you realize all the more that you need to cherish what you have.  So this vacation in particular, which falls during a point in our lives where Joe and I are probably the busiest with outside obligations than we've ever been (and yes, this includes residency) is going to be about happiness and thankfulness, loving our kids and making the most out of the time we have to spend with them.  Even if we're wearing rain ponchos and playing Monopoly indoors for an entire week.

We will be staying at Bluefields Bay Villas and as we are participating in their "Blogging from Bluefields" program, I will actually be updating fairly often this week with lots of pictures and updates.  Make sure you're following my Twitter account if you aren't already, because, you know, The Twitter.  (Insert social media techno-jargon here.)  Hopefully we'll be getting wet only intentionally, and pouring out a bottle of Red Stripe on the sand for our homies in abstentia.

See you there!