First Family Vacation: A Tale of Bitterness and Woe

I remember a time when I had first started dating my husband, and we visited some of his friends. They had baby and the baby was napping. As we were visiting, I was telling some inspired antidote (loudly, I'm sure) and the mother of said child, asked me to speak quietly lest I wake the baby.

Though I, of course, altered my tone, I was pretty sure that she was a real toad of a mother. A ridiculous creature who probably also washed off pacifiers that fell on the floor.

Fourish years later, as the parent of a napper myself, I am amazed that the mother of my memory requested so kindly that I keep it down. Speak loudly in my home when my child is napping, and you are likely to find yourself engaged in a Sharks/ Jets standoff, a' la West Side Story, where rival gang members are bound together at the foot wielding knives. Intruding on a nap (AKA: my free time) is a capital offense at Sloan manor. BE ADVISED.

Anyway, on to our first vacation, where my husband and I thought that it would be a wise endeavor to tote the Young Sloan along on luxurious trip to the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina for a long weekend trip. The drive was reasonable. There was a bit of crying, but we were joyous in our over-confidence. We arrived in Asheville and got checked in and went to dinner, where we thought the baby would sit passivley in out laps. This turned into one of us walking our peevish child, while the other ate; and then trading off. We got back to our room, where we had not reserved a crib, because we thought that we would be a free love family for the evening and all sleep together. The reality of this was that no one slept.

The baby was delirious from lack of sleep, and my husband and I gave up and crawled out of bed at 4:00 in the morning. My husband left for a 12-hour bike race at 5:00 AM-ish, and I was left with a sleep deprived 6 month old all day.

It was, I felt, the worst and longest day of my life. I made the ill-thought decision to visit the Biltmore, America's largest private residence. I took Ivan in the Baby Bjorn, only to find the Biltmore to be more crowded than Calcutta. I had a dream in my head; that Ivan would alternate between sleeping peacefully in his Baby Bjorn and looking about at the Biltmore Christmas decorations in wonder. On this count I was grossly misguided.

Ivan was deeply frustrated with the Baby Bjorn, and made several attempts to escape. His method meant kicking his little legs in a fiendish attempt at freedom and delivering to me several Chuck Norris-esque roundhouse kicks to my gut. When I alternated his Baby Bjorn position to front facing, things went even more awry, as he was exposed to the public. In the cattle car crowded circumstances of the Biltmore near Christmas, my error was grave.

He made frantic grabs for the hoods of the elderly's windbreakers causing more than one stumble. He managed to wrest a directional map away from a passerby, and hurled it across the velvet ropes dangerously close to the Vanderbilt China in the dining room.

As we descended the steps to view the indoor swimming pool, Ivan's shrieks echoed about the closed quarters. When I asked a staff member about a room where I could breast-feed in an effort to calm Ivan, they immediately escorted me to one of the swimming pool locker rooms, where there was an archaic bathing suit hung in front of the sad motel couch stuffed incongruously in the tight space.

When I finished nursing Ivan, I left the room, only to have a staff member with a walkie-talkie inform me that she was going to go ahead and escort me out the back way so I could go home. When I stated that I wasn't finished with my tour, she said again firmly, "I am going to escort you out to the front door so you can take the baby home."

Oh, I understood. I was being asked to leave the Biltmore. They would tolerate no more of my baby shenanigans. So, I packed up and went back to the hotel, where, mercifully, we were able to reserve a crib for the second night and a babysitter for dinner. It was a good night. Good dinner, and Ivan was so miserably tired that he slept throughout the night, not waking until a very reasonable 7:00 AM. It was heaven.

We went down to breakfast early, where I was ready to tuck into a huge breakfast buffet. I had just loaded a plate when my husband looked down and asked if I had dripped gravy on the baby. A) I do not eat gravy, and B) no, I had not dripped. Then the smell hit us like a ton of bricks, as did the ugly realization that the baby had explosive poo that had leaked from his diaper. He was covered from the back of his neck to the hem of his baby dress. I ended up running with the baby from the hotel restaurant with fecal matter dripping through my fingers and stuck in my watchband.

Can it get any worse? Not on this trip. We Sloans gave up. We loaded up the car and drove home as fast as we could. You notice in the picture from our first vacation, I am smiling in the picture and wearing a jaunty scarf. Behind my smile, however, are gritted teeth and hours of sleep deprivation, embarrassment, and a desperation for someone besides myself to blame.

We made it home from our first vacation with the firm decision to take no more vacations until the baby was seven, and we were thoroughly sedated.