@Laura – oh good! Please share them! I’m hoping to find a few new readers 🙂

It was a really great vacation – having 1:1 time with her was great, as well as experiencing all the new stuff in a totally different culture/country. It was also easier to do stuff with 2 people vs. 4 and she is super laid back so she was an easy traveling buddy.

@ARC – wow, that sounds like an awesome vacation. And just the right pace with a 6-year-old. Sometimes kids slow things down…and that’s a good thing. Hmm. Maybe I need to take a vacation like this with my 9- and almost 7-year-old…

I just returned from a 2.5 week vacation to Scandinavia with my 6yo (just the two of us) and as I was looking through Rick Steve’s guidebook, I was overwhelmed by what he suggested we cram into one day. So I suspect you and I have very different travel preferences Laura 🙂 On vacation, we planned for one big activity per day (like Tivoli, an amusement park) or two smaller ones – something in the morning and another afternoon/evening one, with a bit of rest time back at the hotel mid-day. If it was a travel day, finding food and settling into the hotel was the activity for the day. I suspect some people would say we wasted a bunch of opportunities to see more things in the limited time we had, but it was of the the BEST vacations I’ve ever taken, specifically because I didn’t give in to this imagined pressure of “but what if we never come back?” We took it easy, we saw some cool things (but not everything), and we have great memories. Even if we didn’t get to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm…

@Claire – one of the hardest things with having young kids, I have come to believe, is that there is little opportunity to make up sleep. If you’re up at 5:30, there is no snoozing and then feeling bad about it but convincing yourself it was worth it to stay up later finishing things. Just not an option.

@Jennie Evans- life is long! You’ll have plenty of time to do the other stuff later – when you’re feeling better 🙂

I totally agree with this comment Jennie. I am in the early part of my third trimester of pregnancy, and this experience has certainly been a lesson in how to cope with fluctuating energy levels and losing the ability to stand and cook or garden, for example, for long periods. All good preparation for the baby being here I guess!

On a broader note though, this is probably the first time in my life when if I had to pull an all-nighter, I’m not convinced I would actually be able to do it. Realising this is forcing me to prioritise, probably for the first time, and not just on physical activities but on tiring mental ones too.