Days 1 and 2 of the vacation that has been in the works for years but wasn’t going to happen until it did… (and other semi-related stories)…
On December 26th, 2006, we welcomed Ian Justice to our family. And the plan was to celebrate his birthday in incredible ways, because let’s face it… it kind of stinks to have your birthday the day after Christmas.
Turning 5 is a big deal anyway at our house, whether you’re born in December or not. But we decided very early on (maybe even before Ian was born) that we would like to spend his 5th birthday in Orlando… “House of the Mouse”… “Shamu’s Pool”… you get the picture.
As an OCD vacation planner, I have kept meticulous files detailing everything we would do, if at all possible, on this amazing trip. For those who don’t know, our family made trips to Orlando in ’06 and ’08, and Grace and I made a trip (just the two of us) in ’09 (for general assembly). We’re not strangers to the area, but it is special every time, nevertheless…
Well… life didn’t really pan out the way we thought it was going to in 2011, and despite my best deal searching efforts, we called the trip off (sometime in October, I think). I was very disappointed, but there are much worse things in life. I adjusted. (The kids knew absolutely nothing about our plans, which made this much easier).
This thought kept coming back to me, though… Something that I learned from a very wise professor during my Nazarene Bible College days… “Don’t ever make your kids miss out on things just because they’re pastor’s kids”… And I know, for sure, that not everyone who reads this will understand… And heck, I know , quite possibly, that no one who reads this will understand, but as sure as I also know my own middle name and the fact that I have ten fingers and toes, I know that this was exactly why my kids (and especially Ian) were missing out on this one…
And that never sat very well with me… Other people making decisions that affected our family negatively just because they could…
So a couple of weeks ago, I decided to just plug in some dates and look at some prices. As expected, some of the options we’d considered earlier had gone up, many of the cheapest hotels were unavailable, and it just didn’t look very promising…
I probably spent way too many late night hours adjusting this or that to make it work, and finally I was looking at a plan that said, “We could do this…”
At this point, I sent an e-mail to Phil, because as he shares my OCD planning thing, I figured he would probably just laugh at me (maybe hysterically) thinking that we could pull this off with almost zero prep. time. On the contrary, he wanted to see the plan…
To make a long story short, on Wednesday night the kids found a couple of boxes and a letter on the porch from Mickey and Minnie Mouse. And let’s be clear on this… the children who have never believed in Santa Claus do, indeed, still believe in pixies that fly and mice that talk (well… except for Seth… who had to be told in no uncertain terms that he was not to ruin the magic of this for his brothers and sisters)…
Mickey and Minnie invited us to join them for Christmas… We packed in record time… and despite a late start…traffic issues… Caleb and Ian vomiting repeatedly in the van… one cranky baby… a couple of big kids who can’t understand why Mickey and Minnie booked us at Diego’s hotel… and a split forehead (Ian just seems to be intent on making the vacation pictures as incriminating as possible… anyone remember when he fell off the bleachers at Sea World in ’08 and spent the first half of the trip with a black eye?)… I am writing to you from Orlando… and I need to get some sleep if the stories are going to be worth reading…
And just in case you ever wondered… God has blessed us very, very much…
Lisa
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