Before Sophie was born all of the pregnancy magazines told me to take a babymoon, a word that I can’t even believe I just typed in a sentence. For me, it falls in that gag me with a spoon category, a really, really big scratchy, wooden, lame 80s reference spoon.
If I hadn’t spent most of my pregnancy feeling sick, tired, fat and sorry for myself, we may have just taken one. Most days the thought of removing my ass from the couch wasn’t high on the list of priorities, but the idea of getting away — driving somewhere fun (because flying was out of our budget), staying in a B&B (or cheap but clean motel), and enjoying the final moments of non-parent life — well, it sounded nice.
Unfortunately, it started to sound nice when I was about 32 weeks along. And since my medical costs were being covered by Medicaid (thank you, State of Michigan!), it was not advisable for me to pack up and cross the state border. As much as I wanted to get that baby out early, I needed it to happen within state boundaries, AND in the Upper Peninsula. Basically, I needed to stay put.
So we did. And the baby was born and I didn’t travel anywhere until she was about two and a half months old. Since then we’ve gone places: St. Paul for the marathon / half marathon last fall, visiting family for the holidays, lower Michigan for a hockey series. And it’s been great. Leaving home and driving somewhere more populated means things like eating in different restaurants, seeing different sights, and of course, shopping at Target. And until you’ve moved away from one, you don’t know how exciting visiting one can be. Hey, now don’t go being all jealous of my exciting life.
We don’t get to travel as often as we’d like, mostly for financial reasons. Most of our trips include us bringing along the dogs, because kenneling is expensive. However, the last few trips we’ve taken have let us leave the dogs at home, thanks to Scott’s eldest son graciously dogsitting at the house. I was a little too distracted on our last trip to fully appreciate being dogless. But over Valentine’s Day weekend we headed out to Marquette for a hockey tournament (I was playing with the women’s team). We weren’t meeting any other family. We didn’t have any concrete plans other than to hopefully eat some good food and relax in the hotel, relaxing that didn’t involve taking dogs out to pee in subzero temps or even better yet, not having to clean up any doggie accidents inside.
Seriously, I can’t even remember the last time I ate Thai food, and IT. WAS. DELICIOUS.
My daughter was actually able to crawl around on a carpeted floor that didn’t even remotely reek of dog urine. Can you see why I love leaving the house? But what she really enjoyed was the nightly extend-o bath time and ability to flop around in nothing but a diaper all weekend.
I was a little hesitant to go on this trip due to the cost. Unlike most of our hockey weekend series, this one required two nights in a hotel, turning the cost from not so bad to I won’t even think about how many groceries I could have bought with that kind of money. Our team ended up on the losing end of things, and had I played it smart, we could have gone home Saturday night. In the end, we decided to stay the extra night, win or lose, so that we could just enjoy the weekend away.
It was at some point on Saturday afternoon when I realized how much I needed this trip away from our normal life. So many things have weighed on me lately, from the bigger picture what the hell am I going to do if my job goes away this summer stuff to the everyday if I have to clean up one more puddle of dog piss I’m seriously going to lose my fucking mind stuff. Add in the just starting to realize the full ramifications of being a parent smack in the face, thinking it would just help if I could just step away from it every once in awhile and get a break, realizing that there IS NOT BREAK, not even a little one, and having that, well, be kind of tough to swallow on some days.
It was good for us to spend some quality time together, time that didn’t include me nagging about cleaning up or Scott having to attend to job-related emergencies. The hotel’s WiFi was abyssmal, so the laptops stayed packed. It was just the three of us, some good food, a very happy baby and the Olympics on TV.
I know that we can’t afford to do this all of the time, but it was worth ponying up the extra dough for the second night. Even though we were only 100 miles from home, it was far enough.
