There is much evidence to be found that our crew had a great time traveling down to PDX on a train and exploring such a fun city for the 4 days during our Spring Break. What there is definitely NOT photographic evidence of is the HARD that is traveling with kiddos that don’t respond well to new places, new spaces, and days that lack structure. The excitement of a trip feels scary to their trauma-wired brains and usually on the night before or morning of, our behaviors get a little out of whack. In my constant efforts to not only show the beautiful but also the messy…..here is some evidence of “the other side” of our vacation.
This restaurant set the beautiful, serene, peaceful scene for WonderBOY to throw a chair and run out of the restaurant yelling “I hate Mama” at the top of his lungs….the trigger? Asking him to pick a breakfast item off the menu. Insert flushed cheeks from me while Scott chases after him to do some breathing in the hallway. WG and I continue on with breakfast….and I order an extra cup of coffee (and a mimosa).
Man….look at those cute kiddos posing in front of our super cool, somewhat haunted hotel. This spot will be marked in history as “that time the Uber driver drove 10 minutes across town, parked in front of our hotel, saw a 7 year old boy screaming and throwing a toy out into the lawn and then cancelled our ride telling us he had just come down with a fluke stomach thing.” That fluke stomach thing I like to call effective birth control…..you’re welcome Uber driver.
Food trucks….one of the best parts of PDX. Here we had some fantastic street food and some equally fantastic eye rolling, talking to self, bawling and stomping off from our all-tween, all-hormones WonderGIRL. I am also sure that included some name-calling but if she has learned one thing in 2+ years with us it’s to walk away from the parents before calling them choice swear words. We looked like A+ parents as we continued our lovely meal at a table close by….luckily, people in Portland are probably the least-judgemental bunch around so we felt safe and comfortable waiting out this “storm” in front of this crowd. Two nights before in our teeny hotel room, we didn’t have the luxury of walking away, thus resulting in her yelling at me that “I ruined her entire vacation.” Pretty impressive for me to ruin something 1 hour into the trip I’d say.
Last morning in Portland and Scott and I finally ventured back to a breakfast spot introduced to us by our lovely Stori and Tausha (PDX experts). As we sipped our infused Bloody Mary’s (head to Genies next time you’re in Portland!), WG and WB are both pouting because tomatoes were in their egg scrambles. Eventually, WB got so tired of crying about the restaurant “not being kid friendly” and informing us that he couldn’t open his eyes because of the morning swim, he just fell asleep in my lap. Now that he is getting a bit too big for this sort of lap-sleeping, tables had to be shifted and I had to use quite a few muscles to reach that drink of mine to enjoy.
I post these little snippets of time here not as a way to get sympathy, or even as a way to educate you on “how our kids are different than yours” (vacationing with kids is anything but a vacation I get it), but mostly just to document both sides of our beautiful, messy story. The reality of our family is that each day is new and brings about fun adventures…fun adventures usually equal higher levels of cortisol pumping through their little bodies…..higher levels of cortisol equal pretty explosive and defiant behavior (I say stop, you do it 5 more times-type behaviors). And while it’s hard sometimes, I’d say our ratio of the fun to hard is at least 10:1 at this point and I definitely could not have said that 2 years ago. So here’s to growth…..and big dreams for longer and farther vacations in our post-adoption future.