Spending Time with your Family

I’m often at odds with my middle son’s teacher over the school he misses.  It’s not that I let him skip school without reason, but sometimes I feel that there are things going on that would benefit him more than the school would.

For example, our family went away to a waterpark for Family Day this past weekend, only we went on a Monday night and spent the Tuesday there to avoid the crowds.  We arrived just as most people were going home and had the place largely to ourselves. The kids rode the waterslides continuously for hours without having to wait in lines, and I never had to worry about losing my youngest in the crowds.  We had a great family time.

We could have gone on Saturday or Sunday night, of course. It would have saved my wife a vacation day and me a lecture from my son’s teacher, but it was well worth it not to spend some stress-free time with our kids. To a teacher, it might seem that we pulled our kid out of school just to go to a waterpark, but what we actually did was pull him out of school to make the best possible family time that we could.

It’s easy to let school or work or other commitments dictate the way that we live our lives, even the way we take our vacations, but it’s worth taking the time to think about whether there are other potentially better options. The day you take your vacation might seem like a little thing, and it is in many ways, but it’s amazing how much influence those little things can have. They can mean the difference between spending some quality time together as a family or dragging everyone through a holiday that ends up being far more stress than fun.