Do ever freak out the day before a trip? I’d say I’m 50/50. Today was the other 50 for me. Everything seemed to go haywire. I am a very organized person! I thrive on that! The flip side of that is that when something throws a wrench in my well laid out plans, it gives me crazy anxiety.
We are leaving for a ski trip in Utah tomorrow and something about this trip has always felt very disorganized to me. It’s not last minute or anything. We’ve had it booked since April. But it has just felt disconnected to me. We’ve had issues with the rental car, flight times have gotten changed, hotel managers have given conflicting information. Couple that with my nervousness about Little A going to ski school for the 1st time and the whole thing has been strange!
The day began as normal as the day after Christmas can be, but quickly got weird.
I always have a checklist before we leave to go somewhere:
✔️Clean up the house
✔️Run all the errands
✔️Gather the gear
✔️Do all the laundry
✔️Make sure we have food when we get back
✔️Drop off the dog
Generally, these are things I do to maintain my sanity when we get home. I can’t stand coming home from an awesome trip just to realize that I have to spend the whole day cleaning up and doing laundry. But it always makes the day before a trip exhausting for me. With all the Christmas craziness, cleaning the house up was no small feat. So many new toys to find a place for haha (Little A has many wonderful grandparents that love her) And laundry had been piling up for a week. But, it was manageable.
Then, I realized I had forgotten to get down Little A’s ski clothes and try them on her last week. Surprise surprise, the jacket didn’t fit. So began the mad hunt for a ski jacket… IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA! Ever tried to find an XS girls ski jacket in a California store? Let me save you the trouble and tell you it’s practically impossible! Went to 4 different stores and the only thing we found was $110 North Face jacket UGH!! I like nice things, but $110 for a little girls jacket that she’s going to wear maybe twice??? NO THANKS! I was totally freaking out! I mean, the kid needs a jacket!! Luckily Adam remembered there was a Big 5 close to our house and ran over there last minute. He found a perfectly acceptable $40 jacket and I couldn’t have been happier!
But the jacket hunt threw my whole day off. It was 2 hours of time lost when I could have been getting all the other crap done. And I sorta had a meltdown 😲 And after everything settled down, I sat there and tried to figure out why jacket-gate caused me so much stress. I think I pour so much energy into planning our trips, that I expect everything to go off without a hitch. Which is crazy, because travel is never foolproof! Especially when you have a 5 year old in tow. I have to learn to lower my expectations a little bit! It’s OK if not everything goes as planned. It’s OK if the house isn’t perfectly cleaned before we leave. It’s OK to admit to your husband that you were out of line and shouldn’t have taken your stress out on him! I don’t normally do New Year’s resolutions, but maybe 2019 will be the year that I give myself a break. Everything doesn’t always have to be perfect. Travel is not ALWAYS magical. And I am human!
Now, I’m sitting here with a glass of wine decompressing. We are packed. Little A is asleep. And there was only minor damage to my marriage in the process haha. The house is a bit messy and I’m just going to have to be ok with that. Because I get to go some place really awesome with my loves. And they love me…meltdowns and all. Who could ask for anything more?
(And if anything goes wrong and someone has to come into our house, don’t judge, k?)
