We're off!

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After months of talking, planning, sending e-mails and (gulp) wiring money to total strangers, we are finally on our way to Spain. At this moment we are 36,000 feet over the North Atlantic (where the outside air temperature is, according the video screen embedded in the seat in front of me, 63 degrees below zero Fahrenheit), about 3 hours from London Heathrow. We land there at 5:00 a.m. London time, 11:00 pm Minneapolis time. Despite having been force-fed benedryl, the kids are not sleeping. We have a two hour layover there, and then a 3 hour flight to Malaga. At which point we rent a car and drive another 90 minutes east to Rocqetas de Mar. We should arrive there by about 2pm local time, which will be 7am twin cities time, 18 hours after boarding our plane back home. And that’s if everything goes according to plan. Another gulp.

At least the kids are entertained. The boys are on their 2nd viewing of the new James Bond film (which they’ve already seen several times.) (Let me know if these parentheticals become annoying, ok?). Keenan is deep into the Disney channel, having already viewed Happy Feet. Blissfully occupied.

When we first got on the plan, Keenan was so enthralled with all its accouterments - video screen, headphones, pillow, blanket, flight attendants bringing all the pop she could drink - that she proclaimed “This is just like a hotel.” Unfortunately, I think she’s ready to check out of this hotel after four hours.

This is going to be a very interesting experiment in any number of ways; one of the most interesting will be the social dynamic. More precisely, what happens when you take 3 kids who are very social and have lots of friends, and who have a meltdown if they don’t have a playdate scheduled to fill the every waking moment, and plop them down in a new place where they don’t know anyone and don’t even speak the language. Obviously, it should create an enhanced bond within our family as everyone becomes much more dependent on the others. It should also, I hope, help them to learn to entertain themselves a bit more. They won’t have all the usual distractions: friends, TV, computer, etc. They will have to learn to manage and fill their own free time. My own unscientific and biased observation is that our kids and their friends require much more parental intervention to have fun than we did at their ages. I think this is the flip-side of the “overscheduled” child syndrome: because all of their waking hours are booked by their parents, their own ability to create fun atrophies. They literally don’t know what to do with themselves when left to their own devices. And, of course, the available media distractions are so much more numerous than when we were kids, without cable television, computers, ipods, playstations, cell phones, etc. etc.

One of my own goals for this 3 month period is to become a better, more intentional parent. While I’m nervous at the thought of having to entertain my kids during all their waking hours, I also hope that spending so much time with them will allow me to understand them better, and therefore to be more attentive to their needs. While this trip is not all about parenting for me, that is a big part of it. At age 12, Tommy is about to enter the terra incognita of adolescence. From everything I know, the time we spend and influence we have over him will begin to diminish dramatically in the next year or two. What better juncture to have these 3 months together?

Now if we can just survive the next 12 hours of travel . . .

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