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2-19-03 A Phoenix Convention—with Kids Usually, when my husband gets an opportunity for a really good business trip, I go along. With plenty of notice, we can score a ticket for a few hundred bucks and the hotel, most of the food, and the rental car is all on his company. Doing this, I have managed to broaden my limited horizons quite a bit, and have discovered some truly beautiful parts of America. (I most often refuse to come home, but ultimately cave in and get on the airplane when my hubby reminds me that I am a mother with some responsibilities, for pete's sake.) When we found out that he was going to be given an opportunity to travel to Phoenix for a convention, I immediately decided we needed to take the kids. "But
why?" He groaned, envisioning, I guess, the five of us crammed into
a small hotel room. "I
have always wanted to take the boys to see the Grand Canyon." I
replied. "Here is our primo opportunity." Not even
his argument that the Grand Canyon was more than three hours away from
Phoenix ("still alot closer than we've ever been." I argued)
or his ace in the hole: "We totally cannot afford FOUR extra plane
tickets ("we'll put it on the credit card and pray for a
miracle" I answered, ((which came in the form of a nice Christmas
check from my Grandmother)) could dissuade me from the notion that we'd
take all three boys and have a wonderful, marvelous, TRULY NOTEWORTHY
vacation. Two days
before we were scheduled to leave, my middle son started throwing up.
Not just vomiting, but that truly awful, continuous retching which left
him panting on the bathroom floor for hours on end. To say that I was
alarmed would be an understatement. "Are
you feeling better?" I would ask, each time he would emerge from
the bathroom, his face as white as a stick of chalk. "Yes."
He would croak, just as desperate for the lie as I was. By the
time we boarded the plane, he had metamorphosed into a walking case of
the full blown flu. He was pale, coughing, feverish, stuffy, and
generally miserable with the lung capacity of a 99 year old man. My
younger son had caught a bad cold and had developed double eye
infections and had his eyes matted shut with viscous goo. My oldest son
dubbed them: Pestilence and Plague-o. Our tickets, of course, were
non-refundable, so the two P's, my oldest son and my hubby coughed,
sneezed and wheezed our way across the Mississippi River, via Delta and
a lot of pretty unhappy travel companions who had to dodge my boys'
great wet sneezes and coughs for about four hours. We still
managed to have a great time. Pestilence and Plague-o, despite their
great physical limitations, still found the strength to float around in
the swimming pool in warm, sunny Phoenix and to gaze with awe (between
sneezes and coughs) at the Grand Canyon and the surrounding pueblos and
ruins. My hubby, my older son and myself washed our hands with the
diligence of a person with compulsive disorders; so afraid were we that
the other two were going to infect us with some of their sickness. A
couple of times, we had to leave the two "P's" at the hotel
while we completed some vigorous hikes and mountain climbing which their
ill bodies could have never managed, but all in all, a great time was
had by all. "After
all," I told my husband, when we were unpacking the car upon our
return. "They were so sick they couldn't have managed to go to
school the whole time anyway. So when you look at it that way; it is a
good thing we took everyone along." My husband, who had been the
Chief Kleenex Holder and #1 Snot Depository Station for most of the
trip, admitted that that was true, but didn't I enjoy it more when we
DIDN'T have to stay in what was basically an infirmary when we traveled?
Since this whole "take the boys along" had been my big
idea from the start, I of course lied through my teeth and said that I
very much enjoyed sleeping on the sleeper sofa at the Embassy Suites
while they took the beds, instead of staying at the posh resort the
conference took place at, and that the sound of barking coughs really
rather lulled me to sleep at night as opposed to the sounds of palms
brushing against the window.
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