I’ve always associated white picket fences with the idyllic, so when I spotted a vacation cottage with one online, it said, “Rent me! rent me!”
What’s more, it had plenty of bedrooms, plenty of beds, a washer and dryer and dishwasher.
“Our kind of roughing it!” I told the kids. So with hope in our hearts we set off for one of those fairy tale long weekends where grown children and their families set out to bond over a pile of poker chips and a game of Taboo.
The first night of togetherness, I congratulated myself. Not only had we pulled off a soy-free, nut-free, gluten-free cook-out that worked for both vegetarians and meat-eaters. Someone else was rinsing the dishes. I had raised them right.
What’s more, we’d found a nifty place to install the two year old’s Pack and Play and located the perfect spot for the music-playing, duck-footed potty chair. With a sticker chart displayed prominently behind it, it seemed the parents’ goal of potty-training in a single weekend might become a reality.
Unfortunately, the tide turned before the first poker game started – with a giant toddler sneeze. And another. And then another.
Within 24 hours, the sneezing had spread, and so had our desperate, contradictory explanations.
“It’s an allergy,” we first said in unison and cursed the ragweed count. At the same time, we started darting outside, to escape from the germs.
As the sneezing persisted, we chugged both juice and Benadryl and passed a homeopathic something called “olive leaf” – tablets that are supposed to ward off viruses if you take them soon enough.
In case it was a virus, we began to disappear mysteriously for walks and solo car rides (but with the windows up in case it was ragweed) when we weren’t inside washing our hands with antibacterial soap.
Apparently, the olive leaf did not come through quick enough for most of us because in half a day, my son (dad of the Toddler), his brother and then his sister had also taken to glassy-eyed sneezing fits.
The fully equipped kitchen was soon engaged not in meal-making but in tea-making and chicken-soup-making. Instead of playing Taboo, we huddled in front of the TV wrapped in blankets.
Meanwhile, our collective distraction seemed to suit the Toddler, who, though sick herself, was well enough to learn how to climb out of her Pack ‘n Play, over the bed, through the closed pocket doors of two rooms and down a steep set of stairs, all while the nursery monitor stayed as silent as the potty chair.
Still feverish but with great charm, she made her grand entrance downstairs among the huddlers, who by now were too doped up with Benadryl to pay much attention.
One of them later said it was a great vacation. “Don’t sell it short,” he said.
And he needn’t worry. I know it was perfect in its imperfections. I will definitely remember it long.
Copyright 2011 Pat Snyder
