Christmas Card, 2013

This past year has taught us many things, but perhaps the most important life lesson to come out of 2013 is this: brochures lie.  Traveling with small children is a bad idea.  If you see a brochure full of smiling little kids, those kids have just been fed an entire bar of chocolate.  Brochures trick us into believing that we, too, could enjoy a relaxed, fun-filled day of deep sea fishing with the entire family.  You cannot.  It is time we face the facts.  There are some places in this world where parents should not bring anyone under the age of ten, and that place is outside the home.

Our most ridiculous “life lesson” of the year occurred in February.  We thought it would be a nice idea to take the kids to an indoor water park for our daughter’s birthday, and so the four of us secured a room at such a place in Indianapolis.

Things went fairly well until we pulled into the hotel parking lot and were informed by both children that, despite having had access to a delicious McDonald’s breakfast ninety minutes before, they were now deliriously hungry and could only be satiated with a delicious McDonald’s lunch. So we bought them cheeseburgers.  They were delicious.  Unfortunately, at least one of the sandwiches was perhaps undercooked, as our son threw up on himself mere seconds after finishing his meal. 

If you have ever cleaned up this kind of mess, the one were the mess has been stolen from the toddler’s stomach and redistributed onto his clothes, the floorboard and, most importantly, the cracks and crevices of the car seat, then you know that this is not how wonderful travel memories begin.  This joy of discovery continued a half-hour later upon entering our hotel room, which sported a leaking roof and smelled like an understaffed dog kennel.  Now we had competing disgusting odors vying for supremacy, so we cleaned off our son’s clothes as well as we could and found a new room.

By this point the kids were anxious to take advantage of the water park, so we decided my wife would change them into their swimsuits while I finished brining our unnecessarily large array of belongings into the hotel.  This too, was a bad idea, as our son, at that point in his life, had just grown tall enough to reach most door handles.  In an admirable display of comic genius, he chose to make his escape from the hotel room not only when he was entirely naked, but as were his mother and sister.

Thus, he shot down the hallways sans clothes.  My wife grabbed a towel and gave chase.  The door shut behind her.  Locked.  Our daughter, who is capable of being hysterical on an absolute whim, began to shriek like a crazy person because she was alone in a strange hotel room and believed she was trapped while her mostly naked family members were running down the hallway outside.

Because desperation is, of course, the mother of intense foot speed, my wife soon snatched her youngest and began to plead with her oldest to “please open the door mommy needs to put on her clothes!”  As mentioned, the hotel door was pretty easy to open from the inside, and so the remarkably amusing scene was kept pretty short.  Our daughter, still sobbing, opened the door.  My wife, nearly sobbing, entered the door, and then that door was shut and locked by deadbolt.

The only thing that kept me from asking the obvious question upon returning to the room, which would have been “Why in the world did you lock the door with the deadbolt if you knew I was bringing stuff up?” was divine providence. After all, asking that question under those circumstances would have probably been grounds for justifiable homicide.  God clearly did not want me to die at that point, because who, then, would be available to bring up the rest of our wardrobe?

This story should end now, but it does not, because we have not yet reached the part where we had to evacuate the building at 4:17 in the morning.  Usually such predawn exits occur due to false fire alarms.  This alarm, though, was not false, because the elevator nearest our room, perhaps the oldest in the state, really was on fire.  Now, instead of half the family running down the hallway entirely naked, the entire family ran down the hallway with pajamas and coats.  Fortunately I grabbed the keys, so we quickly found suitable shelter in our vehicle, which, of course, still smelled like toddler vomit.

Despite this misadventure, we just recently took our children out in the open again, albeit with much less public nudity.  We took them to Indiana, of all places, but this time, to minimize our exposure, we avoided the state’s capital and instead went to French Lick.  Here we stayed at the historic French Lick Resort and enjoyed a sugary ride on their version of the Polar Express.  Here we met three different incarnations of Santa Claus himself, each of whom was capable of mystifying our daughter and alarming our son. 

Here we dead bolted our room immediately and avoided fast food hamburgers.  We may be silly for traveling with our children, but some lessons cannot be ignored. 

So, in closing, we hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year.  And remember to always lock the door.  

"Am I on the nice list?"

"I am?!  Even after Indy?  Yeah!"