Project: Take a family vacation someday

I don’t know what it’s like to raise a “normal” kid but, gosh, sometimes it seems like something should be so simple but it’s really really not.

In Estonia, the symbol of motherhood is a stroller (preferably a good stroller of the right brand or color) you use every single day — rain or shine — filled with a sleeping baby.

I used to think, “Well that’s easy enough. We’ve got the stroller, now I just put our new baby in it and. Boom💥. We walk together every day and she takes naps and now everything is perfect.” (Okay, perfect is an exaggeration but you get it.)

But Eloise has always hated her fancy stroller. She’s hated facing our chests any carrier or when being held. She’s mildly tolerated facing outwards in a carrier — and yes, we’ve tested like 5 of the things to make sure.

On top of that, her tolerance level for being in places other than our house is almost zero.

Which makes something like a family vacation feel next to impossible. 😅

But it’s been 4 months since Eloise was hospitalized with a bad seizure. So Brian and I have found ourselves starting to dream about goals again.

One of those goals is to take a vacation all together. In a year, in two years in two months—we don’t really care when.

So I’ve started coming up with a step by step plan to get there

1. Take E on a 10 minute grocery store run
2. Make a loop around our street in the stroller
3. Take the stroller a little further, to the nature trail a 10 minute walk away
4. Go to the local open air museum a 12 minute drive away
5. Eat at a restaurant outside
6. Go to the botanical gardens a 20 minute ride away for an afternoon (bonus if we can grab sandwiches there and eat outside)
7. Take E to the zoo a 40 minute ride away and get a nap and a few feedings in there somehow
8. Make our way to something like the Viljandi Folk Music festival and catch a concert or two together and handle an overnight stay
9. If we get this far, then the sky is our limit

Y’all, today she handled a stroller ride ALMOST around the neighborhood without complaining once. 😮

So, step 2 is complete. 🎉

That means family vacation might actually happen someday. Maybe even sooner than we imagined. 🥹