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Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Monday, September 20, 2010 6:32 PM
Today is Monday, but it feels like Saturday.
To be exact, it feels like Saturday after a really long week.
My husband was out of town from dawn on the Friday before last until late this past Saturday night. He was working long hours, mostly out of cell-phone range.
Nine days of that (on top of two week-long trips he took in August) gave me a new respect for military wives.
Here’s the good part: now that Bryan’s home, he’s taking time off and doesn’t have to go back to work until Thursday. The first part of this week is like a mini at-home vacation for us!
We love to travel, so generally we use my husband’s vacation time for that. We plan several trips a year and we really enjoy taking them. If there’s a long weekend, our instinct is to go somewhere.
So I’ve been a little surprised to discover, over the past year or two, how fun it is to have down-time at home. I guess there’s a reason “staycation” is a word.
This morning we took a trip to the apple orchard. Tomorrow we’ll visit the library, and we’re also considering hitting the local children’s museum. Mostly, though, we’re loving being together as a family. We can read books on the couch, linger over breakfast, take naps (even the grown-ups!) and build elaborate train tracks without a schedule hindering us.
Plus, we get to sleep in our own beds. It’s cost-free. And when our vacation time is over, there will be no suitcases to unpack. That fact alone makes it worth it for me!
On the rare occasion that we’re home on a long weekend, we tend to pack our time with to-do lists. In the future, though, I’m going to push for list-free at-home vacations more often. This is the life!
Has your family done a “staycation”? What do you see as the pros and cons of the experience?
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It’s a lot easier to stay home when you have young children. My husband and I did more little trips together during those years. We were fortunate to have inlaws watch the children. Now that my children are older, I love to go away. I’m home all the time, so for me, a break from the constant driving/laundry/dinner making/bed making/vacuuming is very appreciated. So much of it is the stage of your life.
My husband gets so much vacation time that he ends up having to take off works here and there so he doesn’t lose it. We use those home-vacation weeks to get things done around the house, and to do some extra leisure activities that we don’t usually have time for when he’s working. But we’ve never done the type of staycation where every day is recreational. For one thing, I work 15 hours/week in the evenings and don’t get paid when I don’t work, so I only take a whole week off if we’re going away. But, I totally agree that with kids it is so much less work to stay home. We go away for one week out of the year and an average of two weekends away/year (my husband works Saturdays, so we can’t go away for very many weekends). Other than that, we stay home. There’s always plenty to do, fun and chores alike.
We’ve done some shorter “staycations” when we didn’t have the time or money to take a longer trip and we’ve really enjoyed them. For us, the key is to plan family outings, otherwise we get sucked into house projects. We also try to have “vacation rules”—more eating out, lax nap schedules, staying up late to do fun things, etc. It can also be a great opportunity one parent to have for one-on-one time with older kids while little ones are napping, doing activities that are hard to do with toddlers in tow. Enjoy your week! 
My husband gets plenty of long weekends, and we generally stay at home and do local things: beach, museums. It’s nice!
But we also just went away for 5 days/4 nights and it was defintely NOT long enough. We packed too much activity in and not enough hanging around doing nothing. And I definitely appreciated being far way from cleaning, planning meals and the kids’ social schedules.
And my word verify is “island” where I just happened to be vacationing…
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