“No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength”
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Militarische Werke. vol. 2, part 2, pp. 33–40.
It began, as it always does, before dawn.
The children’s rest was fitful with the boy’s machinations loud and frequent enough to soundly disrupt the girl’s. This isn’t exactly out of the norm though, any parent will attest to that, but when their clocks are still firing 3 hours ahead and they’ve had maybe half the rest they usually would you start to get that sinking feeling that the day that follows might not go anywhere near to a plan. Still we managed to get them back to bed each time, hoping to get just a fraction more sleep in them and ourselves, and left our alarms to go off later in the day so we weren’t pushing ourselves too hard.
The WhatsApp group had pinged off well before then though and it seemed that the rest of the in-law crew were already on their way down to breakfast. They were all there by the time we got there, obviously having arrived in dribs and drabs over the course of the last hour or so. Breakfast was the usual kind of chaos it is whenever you’re out with kids: half spoken conversations with other adults, demands of children pulling you away, the musical chairs you play as people shuffle around the table to accommodate…whatever needs to be accommodated. In short: the usual messy affair.
At least the target after that was simple: time in the pool. The kids all wanted it and with the heat of the day already soaking our bones there wasn’t a dissenting voice among the crowd. So we did the needful in getting our lot ready before heading back out to the pool to track them all down, hoping the tribe of littles would be able to monitor themselves.
Which, I feel, if our two were just a touch older it might’ve worked.
Instead it was a replay of breakfast just on a larger, wetter scale. Children needed to be chased, flapping arms assessed as either signs of enjoyment or drowning, splinter cells forming leaving a child or two orphaned from a group sending them into a frantic search for the closest parent so they could then be reinserted back into the throng. Try as I might to strike up an ongoing conversation with my fellow brother in-laws (all the attending female in-laws are my wife’s sisters) though it was clear it’d been a bit too long between drinks for us. That’s hopefully something we can remedy over the coming days.
We pulled the kids out after a couple hours when it became clear that their energy reserves were running low. Trying to corale a group of 8 adults and 8 kids to do something unilaterally is a futile exercise at the best of times and the WhatsApp group messages to try and get us into a single place for lunch didn’t amount to much. For us though we had a lovely time at the in-resort Italian restaurant, due in no small part of the offering of ice-cream should the kids behave themselves during lunch. After that we tried to retire back to the room to give the little man some well needed rest. The fitful nights rest notwithstanding he’s been struggling to make it through the day of late, due in no small part to him being active from 5AM onwards most days. So we hoped that, after being run ragged and filled with sugar, that a crash would be due and we could avoid an afternoon of pain.
He wasn’t having a bar of it though and instead wanted to frolic in the lagoon pool that we had direct access to from our room. Thankfully it was mostly in the shade as the late afternoon sun here was no joke, making walking on tiles a tenuous affair for those brave enough to go bare foot. We spent an hour or so in there, my darling daughter catching sight of some of the floaties that other kids had and, of course, wanting one for herself. She’s usually pretty good at asking people for things but for some reason lost the confidence to go and ask them to borrow the ones they weren’t actively using. I told her that we could go on a shopping run to get her one if she wanted but that didn’t seem to resonate with her as much as the potential of getting one now, should I be the one to ask the other people. Delayed gratification be damned.
Once they’d tired of that we decided to explore the kids club with them to see if it would be something that they’d enjoy. There was a number of other kids there so we figured they’d get into it, especially since there was a new activity on every hour to keep them entertained. They seemed to enjoy it enough so we left them to it so the wife and I could escape to grab a few supplies from a nearby mall.
Which, in the end, was a bit of a waste of time. I figured going to the local mall would be the way to go since I didn’t think any of the street stalls would take cards. Turns out the malls weren’t the place for what we were after (water, snacks and a travel adapter) but the local convenience stores were. So after walking for a bit, navigating the mall and then deciding to leave we found everything we needed right across the road. At least we won’t waste as much time for the next run.
We went back to grab the kids to find the boy face down on the floor, passed out. He’d apparently had one of his trademarked tired-as-anything breakdowns upon discovering we’d left, his sister doing his best to calm him down. That outburst had drained whatever was left in the tank and just lied down, toy still in his hand, and gone to sleep. Our girl had said she’d enjoyed it enough though so, hopefully, with more energy under their belts tomorrow they can spend some more time there and us parents can have some moments to ourselves.
Co-ordinating dinner went about as well as it did lunch, although we did manage to catch the in-law with the new baby and her fiancé. Dinner was still as much of a chaotic affair as it ever was with kids popping in and out as their various needs required to be met. Conversations were still had in half measures but at least I got some good time with the other adults at the table. The boy had to be held back for the first half of the event as he was inconsolable after being denied a second oreo and only seemed to come good after he rediscovered his digital camera. Our girl was much more well behaved, even if she stared numerous daggers my way when she didn’t get exactly what she wanted.
Getting them to bed was easier tonight though, likely in no small part due to how tired they both were. We unfortunately forgot to bring any of their usual books with us so nighttime stories can’t really be a thing but this was mediating by letting them have their preferred lullaby playlist on Spotify for the night. I only hope the PlayStation 3 that the room came with stays powered on for a good long while, the tablet won’t last otherwise.
Dare I hope for tomorrow to be different? Much of what we experienced today can, and probably should, be put down to the spectres of the long day of travel we’re only just now putting behind us. I will admit, there’s trauma there, a PTSD in me that can see family holidays as anything more than another kind of work. So expecting the worst means I’m prepared for it but, at the same time, that kind of thinking also has a tendency to colour your experience of something in that way. It follows then that I shouldn’t just hope for the best, I should instead try to expect it and meet the challenges that come with a view to positive outcomes instead of just plain mitigations.
Strangely it reminds me of a line of thinking spurred on from a conversation (which also came up today in preparing the kids for something) I had with a colleague of mine who just joined Dell. I joked that joining the company would give him the lived in experience to use the term Kafkaesque with authority which, merited a laugh, as well as the retort of the quote from Albert Camus of “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”. In the moment I had taken that as a simple witty backhand on the notion of working in a large beaucracy but upon actually reading into the meaning behind it I found it far more cutting.
You see the quote comes from the line of thinking that trying to find meaning in a universe that is so uninterested in providing it (Camus calls this the “unreasonable silence” it provides to us) is an absurd proposition. So, in the face of such absurdity, we must then find our own meaning/happiness that is not based on external validation. Using Sisyphus as the example we can then imagine him finding happiness in his own absurd situation, something as simple as the boulder rolling back downhill after the day is done providing him that small reprieve needed in order to continue on.
Which is perhaps a long winded way of saying I should probably stop trying to struggle against my own ideals of what “should” be happening and instead find happiness in what is happening. Will I be able to do that? Probably not, but it’s a nice idea to repeat on a blog right?
