This is the fifth and final question.
5. How can fathers prepare for family vacations?
I think it starts with a commitment to take family vacations. A weekend trip to a beach house will afford fewer opportunities for the type of growth and learning than a longer vacation will. Some may feel that a vacation is a luxury best foregone in favor of giving to missions or elsewhere. I’m sympathetic to that perspective, but on the other hand, I am also a steward of very little time with my children and vacations are really a “value” way to get a lot of “bang for the buck.” The rewards of this trip did not end the moment we arrived home, but they continue now and in some respects will last a lifetime.
I think too that if a father thinks that he has to do everything right to make the vacation worthwhile that he may never give it a try. I say, “just go.” Learn from your mistakes and failures and next year do better. The vacation I have just described was not our first and if anyone thinks they have to be as organized or efficient as I may make it appear that we were, they may discouraged from trying. That would be an unfortunate consequence.
Another factor has nothing to do with vacations at all. Parents who are not raising their children to be disciplined and obedient may complain that their kids can’t possibly sit in the car that long. Or they will refuse to use an outhouse. Or they will be unbearable. In many of these cases, the fault lies not with the children but with the parents. I would encourage those parents to make the necessary changes.
There’s another area that doesn’t exactly fit into this question, but I cannot conclude this series without encouraging fathers that vacations involve more than pre-trip preparation and on-trip labor, but they also need post-trip reflection. For me, this is primarily about strengthening the memories made. A trip like this costs a lot in terms of energy, time, and money. I want to stretch that investment further, and we do that by helping the kids to reflect on the trip. This year we started daily journals, and each night they would write an appropriate amount (1/2 page to 3 pages, depending upon the child and where we went that day). We found this to be invaluable in clarifying what we did and why. You never know what goes over their heads until that evening when they ‘re trying to put the day into words.
This post-trip reflection continued after we returned home. Two of our kids have cameras and they were required to name all of their photos. Looking at pictures is another way of assisting the memory. We ‘re also in the process of creating a photobook that is drawn from all four cameras on the trip. We have done this with two vacations previously and I am absolutely committed to doing this every time. Photos on a computer are rarely viewed, but a photobook on a coffee table is often picked up and flipped through. For $30 (at Costco, Shutterfly, MyPublisher, or others), this is the best money spent of the trip.
We also had the kids re-write the experiences of their trips in the form of letters. To make it more interesting, we divided the trip into four portions and asked each child to write about one portion to one recipient (e.g., Grandma and Grandpa). This further assisted the kids in recalling the places we went and why they were important. Grandma and Grandpa loved it too as they received, in the course of a couple of weeks, four letters from four different kids giving unique perspectives on each part of the vacation. (And I scanned all of these for our records before we sent them.)
Another post-trip tool was some more reading. Along the way, as we visited gift stores, I would write down titles of books that looked of interest. When we arrived home, we went to the library and checked out Mayflower, both in the original edition and in the juvenile version. The boys read one while I read the other and we would talk about it every few days. School has started now (and band, and Boy Scouts, and Awana, and football, and soccer, and junior high youth group) and we may not be able to do much more, but today we talked about finding a biography of Abraham Lincoln to read together. I also would like to read some more books in the A History of US series. I look forward to many continued blessings from our family vacation.
Todd, thanks for the whole series, but thank you very much for this post. Your insights and thoughtfulness is exemplary and I want to imitate it. I was helped in thinking through my family’s vacations and making them purposeful. Perhaps The Purpose Driven Vacation might result?
Todd – Thank you for taking the time to share your reflections. They are very helpful as we look forward to some of our first family vacations together as a larger family.