About Me

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Good Bye Arizona. I’m sorry we stayed so damned long.



We leave for home tomorrow. It’s safe to say the kids and I are ready to be in our own beds. It’s been a good trip, don’t get me wrong. We weren’t abused in any way. We didn’t stay in a filthy, germ ridden hotel. We didn’t fall on any cactus or get stung by scorpions. We were able to see many old friends and most importantly, spend a lot of time with family. A lot. Of time.

Here are some Arizona trip statistics for you:
We stayed in Chandler for 26 days. That’s 624 hours or 37,440 minutes or 2,246,400 seconds, not that I was counting. 98% of that time we were hot. (The other 2% we were in Flagstaff just feeling warmish.) It rained a total of 5 minutes, which equates to .000133547% of the time. That’s so insignificant it’s like it didn’t really happen. Now that I think about it, maybe those drips were a figment of my very hot and tired imagination yearning for home.

We didn’t really intend to stay this long, it’s just when my husband happened to purchase the tickets. He saw the cheaper price and hit the “book now” button and realized a little late that it meant we’d be gone for almost a month. Oops. But we’ve made the best of it, even if this 26 day trip was about 16 days too long. How do I know we’ve stayed too long? Well, let me tell you:

10 Signs That You’ve Been On Vacation Too Long

10. The kids cry when you tell them there are 5 more days until you leave for home.
9. Your children start crying when you talk about Daddy and ask why he can’t come here.
8. The kid’s grandparents start conversations off with, “You know, your mother and I were thinking how nice it would be if each one of your kids came out separately for a week at a time next summer. It would really allow us to get to know them better.”
7. The kids start reminiscing about even the bad memories of home. As my middle daughter said to me, “Mom, I miss waking up at home and asking you to make chocolate chip pancakes and you saying no.” Thank God she hasn’t started waxing poetic about the yelling yet.
6. You check to see if you can change your reservations to an earlier flight home.
5. You are surprised to find that changing your tickets would only be $350.00 and it doesn’t sound like a bad price.
4. The kids cry when you tell them that you leave for home the day after tomorrow, with the youngest responding, “But I want to go home NOW.”
3. Every day the kids ask to call their friends in Massachusetts at least twice.
2. I start thinking that if I didn’t see any family or any of my children for 24 hours, it’d be the best 24 hours of my entire life.
1. Everyone starts feeling not only annoyed, but angry that every single room in the house contains a person who is doing something, leaving absolutely no place for alone time. And it’s too hot to take a walk even at 9:30 at night.

Don’t get me wrong, we did have a good time. And for the rest of July I’ll be blogging everyday about the trip, the things we did, events we witnessed, and things that made me laugh. Best of all we spent time with family; parents, sisters, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, friends, and grandparents. That part was worth it. I’m pretty sure I could see all those people in a two-week span however. That saying that fish and company both stink after three days wasn’t entirely incorrect. This stinky fish and her three loud, complaining minnows are swimming upstream toward home.

We can’t wait. 

1 comment:

Tara said...

#5 so sounds like me. I'd call my husband and tell him it's a dagnab bargain because my time is worth something and so are his gonads, and we'd better pony up the cash for an early flight home before someone gets hurt.

I hope you're getting unpacked and planning to write more.