My husband and I are trying an experiment this week wherein we packed up our essentials — kids, laptops, coffee maker — to live and work at a Michigan beach rental for seven days.
What a treat, we figured, for the kids to fall asleep to the lapping of the lake and wake up to the tug of a soft, sandy expanse.
There's no TV, no central air, no frills. We make our meals together in a tiny kitchen and hang our suits and towels on a clothesline to dry. We let the rickety screen door bang behind us each time we ran inside and out and leave the cabin unlocked with abandon. We watch the sunset from our little screened-in porch.
It's bliss.
My children have fought about the following:
Who has to wear the pink goggles.
Who should sleep on the futon.
Whose pillow is fluffier.
Who gets the top two drawers.
Why he's sitting so close.
Why she keeps imitating me.
Why Justin Bieber is worse than hold music.
Earbuds.
The last peach ice pop.
The last lime ice pop.
Whether corn dogs contain actual corn.
Who gets to sleep with Mom during a thunderstorm.
Who got sand all over the futon.
Who gets to shower first.
Who has to brush their teeth first.
Why you hogged Mom last summer at Mall of America and didn't let me sit by her on any of the roller coasters.
Why you won't just drop it.
Why you won't just drop it.
It's just like home, in other words. Except 1,000 times better because we have a beach and a clothesline and a banging screen door and sunsets.
And belly laughs and card games and campfires on the beach and bedtime stories on a (sandy) futon. In and among the fighting.
Which I'm (finally) grasping is how family getaways work. You leave behind your routines and maybe a couple of your headache-inducers (traffic on the Kennedy, for example). But you still navigate competing bids for attention and nurse hurt feelings and quietly settle disputes and otherwise peacefully coexist with the people you love and annoy the most.
It's wonderful practice for the rest of life, which requires mad coexisting skills and usually doesn't take place at a beach.
I wouldn't change a thing.
(Except maybe to stay another week. And, OK, probably the goggles. No one in my family likes pink.)
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