Tick-tock, time has ran out on our family vacation.
With all packed luggage in tow, the family and I say goodbye to our hotel room and head to the elevator. The elevator begins to travel away from the fifth floor toward the lobby level but stops at the second floor. The door opens revealing a small child, confused and lost. A hotel employee, holding the young girl's hand, hopes that we are her parents. Of course we are not which results in the employee whisking the kid away to look elsewhere.
The elevator travels to the lobby level and the door opens to reveal an extremely upset mother, who frantically asks if we've seen her little girl. We instruct her to head up to the second floor promptly where a hotel employee has the child, and is looking for the missing girl's family...tick-tock, how quickly a clock can turn into a time bomb, the type of variety I'd personally like to avoid at all cost.
There are times when you realize that people are not mere numbers. We can assign as many numerals as we'd like to them with social securities, phones, addresses, tax IDs, hotel rooms, and poolside lounge chair flags, but when a mom can't find her child, it becomes extremely personal, where numbers and statistics do not matter.
The mother found her child, of course...one family had themselves the type of unique personalized experience so many of us went on vacation looking for. My guess is that the mother of the once missing, now found child likely enjoyed more than her fair of poolside Gin and Tonics and was happy to be a number, blending into the masses, with her daughter attached to her hip.
All of the routines and the lack of variation in our world creates mental illnesses in all of us...some more extreme than others. At some point in the near future, someone will ask a mother why she's so insane about knowing the whereabouts of her daughter...she's merely doing her part to avoid repetition.
My wife and kids were rarely out of my sight today as we headed back to somewhere near Tampa. The wife and I were rewarded by two relatively wore out offspring that napped on the journey home, leaving us in relative peace and quiet. The trip certainly presented its fair share of nonsense, reminding us that we have obnoxious kids that are extremely challenging and make us a little more mentally ill than we care to admit. To be perfectly honest, they provide the type of variety in life we should be grateful for...It's just that sometimes we crave some routine lacking deviation...that's why they put little numbers on lounge chairs and serve overpriced poolside gin and tonics.
Today's Jazz Hands took the long way home to extend our time together.
Day eighty-seven complete.
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