Go Cheap or Go Sleep

A year ago it seemed like a great idea to save money when booking our December vacation. Unfortunately, my savings were limited only to the airfare portion of this trip. Land cost was non-negotiable. In the wee hours of a December 2010 morning, Clara from Club Med ethered me into believing that a 5:57 a.m. flight from LaGuardia with a connection and lay over in Miami and then another 1 hour and 29 minutes air time to Cancun was brilliant planning and genius cost cutting. A Mensa moment pour moi ... except not really.  My planning turned out to be as grand as a bottle of chugged Mad Dog the morning after ... brutal with a sickening after taste.

What I saved in dollars I lost in sleep from a 3:00 a.m. wake up. Fine. I'm a grown-up and I can function on little sleep. It's what I do regularly and effectively every day (I need to keep telling myself that). Children cannot function effectively or function at all, on little to no sleep. My sleepless children are as bad as any one's sleep deprived kids and about as much fun as a shard of glass in the bottom of a foot. Hindsight is also cruel. Had I known at booking what I lived through now, I would have bought into Net Jet and forwent their college 529s.

Being trapped in an airplane with three sleepless children and a husband who was literally sleep walking through the airport is like a slow arterial bleed. Eventually, your life will slow leak out of you while you suffer every beat of your heart. One child melted into a puddle when she couldn't find a piece of gum in her cavernous plane carry-on. This same child poked me on my face 75 five times and played feet bongos with the seat of the poor man in front of her -- incessantly. All three children refused to sleep. The layover was torture. Chad couldn't walk a straight line and kept tripping everyone in his path with his carry-on bag / tripping device. They were hungry. They weren't hungry. They were thirsty. They weren't thirsty. Their feet were hot. This one was chewing too loud. That one wouldn't share markers... and my blood kept draining from my body.

My friend Jess, a frequent traveler to the UK along with her British husband and their children, knows the pain of air travel with exhausted children. Add juvenile jet lag to the equation and temporary foster care doesn't seem like such poor option.

Once while flying to London, her younger son was so whacked out of his mind tired he wouldn't sit in his seat, wouldn't wear the buckle and only wanted to be in the aisle or on a lap. He got so wound up that he proceeded to use his pacifiers as a projectiles across the aircraft cabin. No one was spared and many passengers received a binky smack-to-the-head, forehead, eye. His pacifier javelin throws were also accompanied by an operatic level of screaming for seven hours straight. No one slept. Add to the insult, some injury. Her older son decided to eat a cashew for the first time and nose dive right into an anaphylactic allergic reaction partnered with two vocal retching bouts.  One massive reaction and a twin vomit explosion, two doses of medicine (sleepy version) later, and the kid still didn't sleep a wink.

It's not worth it. Pay the damn airline and recoup the flight costs in happy, adorable, excited-to-be-going-on-vacation children. Lost sleep isn't added back into the kitty so easily. The predawn airline flight is the intro to the next three days of your vacation. Behavior mid-flight is the rule for sleepless tots, not the exception and it extends to the start of any vacation. Older kids fair better once back on land. Sleep deprived children under the age of six are like gremlins when exposed to light ... little devils.

Sleeping Beauty... Finally

Reader, there is a lesson in all of this if you don't pull the emergency release hatch of your plane 38,000 feet over the Atlantic and jump sans parachute or seat cushion. It doesn't get that much better on land. I did not enjoy my first three days with my youngest child in Mexico. Neither did anyone else near us on the beach. I did, however, enjoy my first three days with our beloved friends and my BFF, Mr. Mojito on the rocks.

My Best Friend 

Reader, you will not enjoy your first three days in tropical paradise either until your gremlins recharge their batteries and catch-up on sleep. Cancun, Mexico can very quickly become Dante's Inferno when your kids are walking zombies. So when in Rome do as the Romans do and when in Mexico drink Tequila and when in Hell, do as the devil would do and drink heavily...

And when in Long Island booking next year's vacation, don't ever, never, ever do what Carla from Club Med tells you to do...