The toddler tradeoff

Proposition: To spend one night away, 25 miles from home, at a ranch the kids have visited several times before--the ranch/retreat center belonging to our church, where Edith and Alice know the ranch managers and their kids, and where we've been invited as guests for a night between fun Friday and Saturday events.

Potential pros:
A change of scene; a mini-getaway; a live bluegrass concert and a melodrama, both performed in an outdoor ampitheatre; a chance to do volunteer work as a family the next day (it's the biannual ranch workday); a chance for the kids to run around outside in a beautiful setting; a gorgeous, fairly short drive; the opportunity to see and interact with other adults; the ability to participate in and feel a part of community events, when so much of life with young children is isolated and routine-driven

Potential cons:
Laborious packing, even for one night (we all need linens for the bunkhouse and layers for the mountains; no one but me can yet pack her own stuff); a change of routine, including staying up later than usual, not controlling the menu, and sleeping in a strange place, all leading potentially to hunger, sleeplessness, irritability, and everyone's being off for several days

The decision:
We did it. Because I thought the fun parts would outweigh the potential hassle and upset. How much upset could one night away, that close to home, really be?

The result:
Alice is wired and won't fall asleep until 11-ish and only then in my (twin) bed with me.

She wakes up periodically through the night, as I try frantically each time to keep her from crying and waking up both her sister in the bunk above and the other, elderly guests through the wall.

She is awake for good at 3:30ish(? I didn't have my watch)--and she's darn cranky about it. The only thing that will keep her from wailing for food is nursing. I can't sit up straight on the lower bunk to nurse but neither can I lie down, because she has been lying on both my arms for so long I'm losing feeling in them. So I sit, awake, feeling most cowlike, hunched on the edge of a lower bunk, for who knows how long until there's some light outside and we can get up. Life looks very dark indeed at 4am.

The only lunch food is deli meat (Edith is a vegetarian), and I can hardly keep my eyes open, so we leave in the middle of the workday part of things, feeling we've hardly been any help at all. Both girls are completely off their eating and sleep schedules. We stop for pizza on the way home, at 3:30pm, then they both sack out in the car, at 5pm. Edith is susceptible to being woken up when we get home, in an effort to reset her internal clock, but Alice is not. I put her in her crib, thinking she may be out for the night. But no, she's up again at 7:15. Who knows when we'll get back on track.

And I didn't get much time with other adults, as I was watching Alice most of the time. No one else had a toddler there. I tried not to mind being on the outskirts of the happenings, or self-conscious that I was very poor help at the workday tasks.

On the other hand:

Alice and I got to see the sunrise over the Front Range from the top of a  golden grassy hill.

Edith and I got to go exploring in the woods,with a sleeping Alice on my back, and we sat by a pond and watched swallows swoop and skim the water, over and over, wondering what made them do it.

Edith got to spend two days roaming freely with two kids who live like that all the time, enjoying both the socializing and free range of the outdoors.

The bluegrass was fun.

Edith enjoyed her first melodrama. Except how girly the heroine was--but evidently the fantastical plots twists made up for that.

We got to enjoy the most gorgeous of the drives near our home, up Ute Pass and into the high valley at 9200 feet. It's stunning every time.*

In sum:

I don't know whether upsetting the routine with toddlers is worth it or not. Obviously many people feel it isn't, judging by how underrepresented families with toddlers are at public or social gatherings like the one we attended at the ranch. (There are plenty of young families in our church congregation, just not at the ranch overnight and workday, despite both being advertised as "family friendly.") I know other people who do travel with their toddlers, the pleasure they derive from it apparently trumping the difficulties.

I really can't decide. I can think back to some of the trips we've made or gatherings we've attended with our kids, and while I remember the good parts, time hasn't made the pain and hassle fade. (Sometimes not for them either--Edith still holds against us a particular trip at age three.) I think, if I had an active and intimate circle of friends and family nearby, who made me/us feel plugged into a larger group of people we cared about as part of our daily lives, I'd be inclined to stay near home in these years. But when that's not the case (nice neighbors notwithstanding), sometimes the routine gets so isolating and limited for the adults involved (love of chldren notwithstanding), that I'm desperate to get out of the rut a bit. Until we actually try it and retreat home, swearing we won't do that again soon. And then 60 nights of the bedtime routine later, and...

What about those of you with toddlers and preschoolers?

Have you curtailed your travel and participation in public and social events? If so, do you feel a sense of loss? (If not, what's your secret?) If you still travel and participate in public events, have you modified the way you travel and participate? Does it feel like a reasonable compromise? If you still travel and participate uncompromised, can you clone your kids?

And if this sounds familiar, at what ages has being limited by the routine been hardest for you so far? (The kids' ages, that is, not yours--though I suppose those might be relevant.)

For example, we popped infant Edith into a sling and continued getting out to restuarants and baseball games and church, etc. unhindered for those first 4 or 5 months. Infant Alice slept peacefully in a bouncy chair next to my desk while I worked a full-time job, until she was about 5 months old.

On the other end, I feel that we can start to push Edith's limits considerably more than we could even six months ago. For example, I knew that dinner at the ranch Friday night was going to be BBQ sandwiches, so I told Edith I was going to stop to get her pizza slices in the last town before the ranch. I knew where the pizza place was. Unfortunately, I didn't know they stopped by-the-slice orders at 3pm. Edith was disappointed but understanding when I explained the problem and promised I would figure out a way to feed her. As it was, that involved my retracing my steps through rural, ranching Colorado at 7:30pm looking for a frozen dinner for her, and it was another 90 minutes before I had returned to the ranch and found someone who could open the kitchen for me so I could heat it up. Edith was hungry, but in the meantime, she happily attended the melodrama on her own and hung out with the ranch kids. The pleasure of being there and her understanding of why she wasn't being fed when and how we'd planned made her able to cope with her hunger. And critically, Edith can also now sleep when she's tired, for the most part.

But those toddlers, with their dependence on routine, their inability to tolerate hiccups in the system, and their ability to throw sustained tantrums...well, it's why the post is named what it is.

When Alice and I walk the ranch's labyrinth at 6am, she mocks our experience of the preceding 7 hours by stopping at this stone. That, or she is having a profoundly reflective, transformative experience in the labyrinth.

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*That drive up Ute Pass always makes us think about another theoretical tradeoff: Were we to stay here long-term, would we want to live

(1) where we are now, on the edge between the flatlands and the mountains, in an aesthetically cute but completely touristy town, with very nice neighbors but rather unappealing 1970s ranch housing? or

(2) in downtown Colorado Springs, where there is beautiful old housing stock and we could walk or bike almost everywhere we needed to go, but it's completely flat and more urban without being wonderfully, densely, diversely urban? or

(3) further up into the mountains, where the landscape is what Colorado is all about and feeds your spirit every day, and the kids could have the kind of outdoor, free-range, exploring-nature lives on which Edith thrives (and I imagine Alice will start to), but where we'd have to drive much farther to work, and where I admit the nerd quotient (and accompanying bookstores, coffee shops, etc.) is a bit low for me and the America-first and NRA quotient is a bit high. Oh well. It's probably not a dilemma we'll actually need to face. But it does make us think, when push comes to shove, about what matters most to us.