Vacation Mode: Mastered

Summer baseball finally wrapped for both boys, I leave for sorority recruitment travel next week, and for one week it’s just the four of us:

Matt,
Dixon,
Thackston,
and me.

My core four, uninterrupted, at the beach.

Last night at dinner, Dixon looked up from his plate and said, “You know, we’ve really mastered the family vacation.”

I asked what he meant. And one by one, everybody at that table started naming the reasons why.

My type A brain, the one that plans everything down to the dinner reservation, could not let that conversation go unrecorded.

So here is what a houseful of us think we’ve actually figured out in the Adams family and why we believe our family has unlocked the code to the perfect family getaway.

Before a single hotel gets booked or a single reservation gets made, the four of us sit down and just talk.

• What do we desperately need this time?

• What are we hoping for?

• What do we want to feel by the time we’re driving home?

• What’s the vibe we’re after?

We each take a turn answering out loud and nobody moves on to logistics until everyone has spoken.

It sounds almost too simple to matter. But naming what you need before the trip changes everything about how the week actually goes.

This one took me longer to learn than I’d like to admit, mostly because I’m usually the one who plans the trip, which means I have opinions about how it should go.

(I know y’all are shocked!)

The last two days, Dixon has wanted to leave the beach early to shower and relax ahead of dinner. At 4:30 pm, which happens to be mine and Matt’s favorite hour of the beach day. We just let him go. Nobody sulks. Nobody guilts him into staying with us longer. He goes and does his thing and we stay and do ours.

Same with Thackston, who enjoys sitting by himself in a beach chair at times, even when the rest of us are swimming in the ocean. We let him have that too.

Everyone on this trip is on vacation. Not just the person who booked the trip.

A few summers ago we took our first family trip to Europe. We went to Italy and it remains one of the best vacations of our lives. Epic. The perfect introduction to European travel. We still talk about it constantly. On our last full day, we were staying in Sorrento and I had a whole day planned in Capri: shopping, lunch, a couple of historical sites. I had done my homework.

On the ferry over, the boys turned to me and said, “Hey Mom, what do you think about us scrapping all our plans for the day and just heading to a beach club and chilling?”

I am, by nature, a planner.

Every detail attended to, every hour accounted for.

But we threw the whole itinerary out that morning and found a beach club instead and it turned into the best day.

My organized self will always love a plan. But you miss things, real things, if you never let a good whim talk you out of one.

My boys will tell you I’m borderline militant about the house before we leave for a trip.

Fridge emptied of anything that will spoil. Fresh sheets on every bed, clean towels in every bathroom. Trash out. Every surface wiped down. It’s a lot of work in the hour before we walk out the door, but when we come home tired and sunburned and the house is clean and smells good and nothing is waiting on us, it makes the return so much easier.

I do the same thing at work. My first day back is never a mad scramble to catch up on email and back-to-back meetings.

It’s a soft landing on purpose. I plan for re-entry the same way I plan for the trip itself.

We are quick to name what’s wrong on a family trip.

The meltdown, the traffic, the restaurant that didn’t live up to the hype.

We are much slower to stop and say the good part out loud.

Dixon did last night, without being asked, without it being a big production. He just said it. And once he said it, we all got to spend the rest of dinner talking about why, which is a much better use of a Tuesday night than any of us expected.

Naming what’s working doesn’t just document it. It teaches everyone at the table to keep doing it.

It’s about how we treat each other when nobody’s watching the clock.

Dixon is home from college for a hot minute. Thackston hasn’t started his junior year yet. I know full well a week like this with all four of us uninterrupted, will not stay guaranteed forever.

So when my son looked up from his plate last night and said we’d mastered this, I heard something bigger than logistics. I heard my boy telling me he felt loved this week. Free to be exactly who he is this week.

Call it five tips if you need a list. I call it the result of nineteen years of trial and error.

With love,