Holiday plans for 2010

For the past several years I had been aiming to head to China this summer, when Mustang was 10 and Button 7. But for a variety of reasons that isn’t going to happen – not this year. One of the big reasons is that last year I had a lot of big expenses – special learning interventions for Mustang, a new car, and a dog. Lovely, at least, is sort of paying her way, though she hasn’t done so completely yet.

The other reason, just as important, is that I think a trip to China might be “wasted” on the kids at this age. Not really wasted, but mostly all they want to do still is play, swim, fish, run around and have fun. The adoption agency I used to adopt Mustang offers kid-friendly “homeland visits” and if we did go this year I’d do that, plus maybe stay a bit longer to visit a few other places. (And I would very much have liked to get to the World Expo in Shanghai – though the city’s likely to be atrociously expensive). But an organized tour like that is also quite expensive, so we’ll forego it for a year or two longer, and make the trip once the kids are at least a bit more inclined to do some real cultural exploration. (And then there’ll be a trip to Ethiopia a few years after that…)

So this year, the main holiday will be a trip to parts in eastern Canada – Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick. Laolao and Laoye left the bus here last fall, parked at a storage facility outside the city, so they’re flying back in mid-May and will spend part of the summer with us again. They’ll leave a couple of weeks earlier, in mid-June, and the kids and I will fly out to join them at the end of school. Then we’ll take a leisurely two+ weeks to wend our way back home, spending time exploring this country’s Maritime richness.

Other than that, I’ve got them booked into two different daycamps here in the city – at the Farm, which they both love, and a Science Camp for Button while Mustang will enjoy a Junior Zookeeper Camp. (Button would like to do Zookeeper too, but you have to be eight years old – maybe next year.) Then we’ll all spend a week at our church’s overnight camp in late August (I’ll help in the kitchen, like I did last summer). Maybe another weekend at the fishing campground close to home, some swimming lessons, and voilà! a summer full of fun.

Laolao and Laoye will likely start to head home to western Canada by mid-August, taking their time and enjoying the sights along the way. If they spend a month travelling the roughly 5,000km, that will give them lots of time to relax and enjoy themselves.