Watching YouTube videos had begun to wear on me. And reading about health issues was depressing. I set my phone down, looked out the window, and began to reminisce about all the places I had traveled. Smiling, I thought back a few years to one of the shortest trips I have ever taken. It was a long weekend cruise in the Bahamas with our four adult children. This trip turned out to be one of my favorites.
The idea for this family time all started when my stepdaughter asked what we were going to do to celebrate our company’s 30th anniversary. We thought of many ideas, but nothing seemed to work. A friend suggested the idea of taking a trip with all our children to celebrate. I was not sold on the idea.
Travel is hard! And realistically, things do not always run smoothly with siblings and especially in a blended family. But I soon put aside worries of sibling issues and began to embrace thoughts of a family trip when I realized this opportunity to get just the six of us together would never happen again. Later that year, we would eagerly welcome a daughter-in-law into the family and a year later a son-in-law. And just recently we have been blessed with a granddaughter.
Ideas of traveling for a week or more to extravagant places with all our children began to excite me more and more before we started to work on rearranging six adult’s schedules. Merging our free times together became a bit like herding cats. Emails flew back and forth as my husband and I worked on booking the cruise, hotel accommodations, airline tickets, and shuttles for all the different schedules. This flurry of emails continued for weeks. As much as I tried to shake negative thoughts away, chills of uncertainty crept through me. I remember telling myself several times, “This trip’s never going to happen.”
But somehow, we managed to find a long weekend where everyone was available. The cruise was wonderful. We spent every minute together! We all went to dinner together, we listened to each other’s stories, laughed at each other’s jokes, and saw a late show. We spent an entire day at the beach, shopped the markets, and enjoyed showing each other our purchases. During this long weekend trip to the Bahamas, none of them ever excluded anyone. It seemed, that for the first time, the “his” and the “mine”, had blended into OUR family.
Our children made this trip incredibly special. My husband and I had received the biggest gift they could have ever given us. I am so grateful for that time we had with them. This trip taught me to treasure every moment with loved ones–no matter how short the celebration or how insignificant the day may seem at the time!
The trinket I discovered that may help me when writing for children, is that when we flood our minds with thoughts of how something could have been better, we drown out precious moments.
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