Tag: St. Louis

Posted on in Conscious Parenting, Summer Trip, Travel

An Amazing Family Summer Trip Part 4

After spending almost 2 weeks in southern Utah, we beelined across the country to Hot Springs, Arkansas. We stopped briefly in Albuquerque, New Mexico to visit with a friend and see Petroglyphs National Monument. Then it was onto Hot Springs National Park with a stop in Oklahoma City to exchange our rental van. In Hot Springs, we explored the park, the downtown area and went to the Arkansas Alligator Farm and Petting Zoo.

7/29/2023

We are 2 days into our 3 days of driving from Utah to Arkansas, and the van is vibrating like it shouldn’t for the last 2 hours.  When we rented the van, they gave us one with 50,000 miles on it.  We’ve added over 5000 miles to it.  I kind of expected a break down when I saw the mileage and the shape of the interior…They are hard miles.   We are still mobile but there is definitely something wrong with the car.  However, I am having a hard time rolling with this disruption and the logistics.   Fear of losing money.  Fear of missing out.  Fear of being responsible for it all.  

7/31/2023

I am now in possession of a back seat to a Chevy Express and an extra tank of gas from our exchange.   We drove our vibrating van 100 miles to exchange that took 2 hours due to a poorly programmed computer system and irate customers.  Unfortunately, they exchanged our 15 passenger Chevy Express for a 12 passenger Ford Transit.  We left the last row of the Chevy in our house on the East Coast to give us room for cargo.  Now the van is in Oklahoma without the seats.  I’ll return the seats when I return the van in 2 weeks, but I bet these two shall never meet again.  So lots of melt downs yesterday as many of us were over tired from staying up late. And we survived.

8/1/2023

  1. Oklahoma is not as flat as I remember or attribute to it…at least not the part we drove.
  2. I think we are burnt out.  After 3 solid days of driving and 5 weeks of seeing and doing, I am having a hard time finding the motivation to go see and do more here in Hot Springs.   And yesterday when I said we were going out, the kids only wanted to stay behind and keep playing.  (This Air BNB has lots of board games.) Yes, doing nothing isn’t wasted time, but even I have a hard time with this when I know we probably won’t be back.  Working to readjust my expectations for today.  (I already had to give up on my massage as the place is closed on Tuesdays.   ).
  3. The husband is getting both dogs the next time we are in a hotel.  After having them two days in a row and being woken up early etc., it is his turn.  In the past we’ve split them up but not this time.  I told him this and he gave me what I interpreted as “Ok, but I don’t think so.”  Now I need to stick to this statement in two weeks.
  4. There are a lot more trucks driving the southern route of the US than the northern route.

After Hot Springs, we went to Memphis, Tennessee for a couple of days. We visited Beale Street, the National Civil Right Museum, and the Historic Peabody for the duck walk. We also had good BBQ and fried chicken.

8/4/2023

  1. Hot and humid is hotter than hot and dry.  I knew this but to feel it so dramatically over the course of a week as we drove east, drives it home.
  2. My husband is horribly out of shape.  I knew this, but I think he is finally realizing it. He always says to me, “I work out more than you think I do.” And maybe he does, but lifting a weight in his office and slowly pacing the house does nothing for cardiovascular health. He says things like if you tell me to go to the doctor, I will go and then he will give me a BS reason why he can’t make the appointment at the last moment. I want to support him in being healthier because I want him to stay around, but I can’t be responsible for his health. He will say things like “ask me to walk the dogs with you,” but more times than not he says he is too “busy” so I stop asking.  I have too many other worries and anxiousness that this is one item I am consciously trying to shed other than making appointments.  But sometimes it feels like because I love him, I should worry and nag more and take more of this on.  And I am also annoyed as his unfitness limits what we can do with him and if he is going to attend an outing, everything has to be planned around what he can do.  It also doesn’t help that on some health items, we have fundamental different outlooks.
  3. As we have been discussing, we all need to be kinder to ourselves or maybe see ourselves with the awe our kids see.  I am driving a big 12 person van.  And twice last week, the 10 year old was in awe of my maneuvering the van in tight spaces.  When he said with all honesty that was great maneuvering, my first knee jerk was not it isn’t.  Why is that?  I caught myself and said thank you but all I could think though was someone who drove this type of van all the time would do much better.  Why do we expect such perfection and knowing how to do everything great.  My kid thought I did great.  I did do great.  I didn’t hit anything and got the car out of the parking space.  Working on that grace and compassion.
  4. Funny note: Last year, the week before school started, all the kids picked one activity and we went and did them as a last hurrah since we had no camps.  They were 2 hour activities and we had a lot of fun.  The 7 year old commented today, “Aren’t we doing that again when we get back?” Uhm, no.  We’ve been doing all summer.
  5. The pandemic has really hit downtowns hard.  Memphis downtown is an interesting mix of rundown area, tourist area and what I assume are offices.  However, there is very little traffic.  Maybe due to the heat there aren’t that many tourist and without the offices filled, it is empty from what the density indicates it should be. St. Louis was similar.
Posted on in Conscious Parenting, Summer Trip, Travel

An Amazing Family Summer Trip Part 1

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.