Everybody needs a long weekend away, every now-and-then.
I probably waited a little too long to take my mini vacation, but I am happy that I did it.
My goal was to wait until I had sent the last file of The Enterprise-Tocsin’s Profile 2018 magazine. A lot of work went into this special section, and I am happy to say that it went to press on Thursday, and it will publish on Feb. 22.
The very minute the last files went to the publishing company last week, I left the office and went home to do my last-minute packing for my family’s long weekend vacation to Little Rock.
When I first came on board at the paper six months ago, I only had one child. Now I have two, and the smallest turns 5 months old this week.
The family enjoyed Little Rock. It’s a nice “small big city.” We had a great hotel stay, and we were able to get a break in the weather long enough on Friday to take Ellie and Sarah to the Little Rock Zoo.
Ellie, who is the most underwhelmed child I’ve ever met when it comes to things like animals, was her typical self. If it’s not a dog, she’s just not going to care.
The only time she really showed excitement was when she got to yell at the goats in the zoo’s farm exhibit.
Sarah was just thrilled to be pushed around for three hours, napping intermittently.
We stopped at one point, and we took Sarah out of her car seat so that she could stretch her legs – while sitting on my lap of course – for a little bit, and while she was sitting there, I noticed that she had grabbed a piece of paper I was holding out of my hand.
“Should she be grabbling stuff at this age?” I asked Callie.
“Yes,” she responded. “She’s been grabbling stuff for a while.”
At that moment, I realized just how long it had been since I had spent such a lengthy period of time with the girls.
I get to hold them at night, of course, and I see them a good bit on weekends, but the little things go over your head when you are working from your phone or you are preoccupied with work-related matters.
Taking the extra day and cutting it all off for an entire weekend provided a good wakeup call for me.
I need to do that more often than every six months.
Granted, I don’t need to gorge on food at the pace that I did in Little Rock’s River Market District all that often, but there’s nothing wrong with turning off the MacBook, ignoring the email alert on the phone and just directing all of your attention on your family.
Things get busy very quickly around the newspaper office, but I’m hoping that I can have another three-day weekend with the family very soon.
