SPRING BREAK IS NOT A VACATION…

To all the parents out there, congratulations!  You made it to the other side of Spring Break!  I hope by now you’ve recovered. 

After all, Spring Break bears no resemblance to the Christmas holiday, when you do a lot of loafing, lolling and lounging...  Spring Break is in and of itself an exclamation!   It's Spring Break!! As they say, you can sleep, or get to those juicy beach reads, when you’re dead.  

There is no rest for the weary for the Spring Break parent!  In fact, if you aren’t using this precious time to party like a teenager (which, by the way, is embarrassing the f-ck out of your teenager…), or to zipline through a tropical rainforest, or to don a ceremonial kimono while drinking tea and experimenting with exotic cuisine, well, then, I can’t really imagine what it is that you are doing…

But alas, here’s the one thing I know you are NOT doing as a Spring Break parent anywhere: Relaxing.  Spring Break is the vacation from which you need a vacation. 

If your kids are little, there’s the unrelenting packing, planning, executing, and troubleshooting, day in and day out.  Rejigger, rinse, repeat. Add a heavy splash of bawling and bickering.

If your kids are bigger, there’s the usual logistical stew with all the fixings: separate flights, schedules, the “room” for the girlfriend, and lets not leave out the ulcer-inducing worry during the portion of the trip when el ninos fly to Cancun solo and are forced to troubleshoot on their own.  There’s only so many times you can tell your kids to "make good decisions" before you morph into the Peanuts’ teacher, and all they hear coming out of your muffled maw is “wah wah wah wah wah…”

So, dear parents, take a few minutes this week to bask in the afterglow of a job well done.  Pour yourself a drink, peruse your camera roll – and let the memories wash over you without the panic and the pressure that it all goes smoothly and without incident. 

Trust me, I was there, and I saw you.  You were present to cater to everyone's every whim, to ensure that they had what that they needed at each turn, regardless of things like sudden foot growth or weather changes.  You lambasted yourself for forgetting to bring, of all things, Purell, and were sure your kids were going to catch Flu A thru Z as they dragged/dropped their crap on airport floors across America without a germ killer in sight.   And look at them now: they’re fine…

You were the manager, babysitter, housekeeper, hairstylist, cruise director and referee for two weeks straight across time zones, and now you have the pictures, 6,492 of them, to be precise, to prove it.   

So enjoy them. 

The only way you can screw it up now is by posting a montage of your offspring in no less than four different A Perfect Moment sweaters.   Seriously -- don’t do it.  You're welcome!