My husband loves to travel, loves the change of going or living somewhere new. I like to travel, and I like the constancy of home. Since I switched jobs several years ago and accelerated by the COVID pandemic, I am now a remote worker and not tied to an office with flexible hours. Thus, my husband wanted to travel for the summer and after some trial and error on type of trip and location, we came up with a driving tour of National Parks. As a Christmas present 2 years ago, I received a deluxe National Parks passport book and the goal to visit and stamp the 400+ sites in the book. This trip fed nicely into that goal, and I was excited about the possibilities.

I was not excited about managing 4 kids with no childcare, the packing, the travel details etc. while working full time. To help mitigate this, I decided to take intermittent vacation instead of continuous vacation. I took two days off a week throughout the trip. We had two days to do all day activities and then afternoon activities on the other days with me working mornings and evenings. We did most of our driving on the weekends to avoid taking days off of work.

During this trip, I wrote my observations of the trip for my conscious parenting group. If you are new to conscious parenting, check out Dr. Shefali Tsabary. I work with a coach who graduated from Dr. Shefali’s Conscious Parenting Coaching Institute. The coach and the group help me parent with connection and emotional intelligence rather than screaming and strict discipline. I have modified the observations to make more sense to a general audience. However, background in conscious parenting and awakening consciousness may help with understanding. Feel free to ask questions.

I may do more detailed summaries of our stops for later posts, but initially I will stick with my initial observations. We started the trip on the East coast and our first stop was St. Louis. In St. Louis, we visited the Gateway Arch National Park, the St. Louis Zoo, the St. Louis Science Museum, Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site and the City Museum. We also played at Turtle Park and took a riverboat ride on the Mississippi River. Here are the observations from the week:

6/30/2023

1. Kids don’t need all these activities we’ve planned.  The hit of St. Louis was Turtle Park, a playground down the road from our Airbnb.  The 2nd Biggest hit was the City Museum which is multiple big jungle gyms for kids.  And now they are enjoying sitting around playing D&D with each other and other games.  Still on with the activity schedule.
2. Our society moved from corporal punishment for kids to shaming of kids to get obedience.  Where as animal training moved from corporal punishment to positive reinforcement training.  I know animals don’t have communication to allow shaming as an option, but apparently animals have more rights than our kids. I was at a NPS National Historic Site Museum (not super interesting for young kids) and watched a mom with 3 kids guessing between 3 and 10.  The middle one started crying. She asked him to stop and then took them outside when he wouldn’t.  She then stood there berating/shaming him to get him to stop crying. After a bit, they came back in without a crying child but he was emotionally detached.  And I so wanted to say, “there is a better way” but obviously couldn’t.  This is absolutely something I have done in my unconscious past and something I still do sometimes in my awakening self, so no judgement, and I was seeing how I must have looked to my kids in the moment where I am yelling and shaming them.  I also thought that if this is the interaction with others we are modelling to our children, is it any wonder our society is so screwed up sometimes. 
3. My kids don’t like fast food, hot dogs, pizza and other typical on the go at amusement park places as much as they think they do.  They haven’t realized it, but they’ve eaten the best when we stopped at Subway or when they ordered sandwiches and salad than when we ordered pizza and hot dogs.  I wish it was easier to get vegetables on the go.