10 Struggles You Face Coming Home From A Family Vacation

Family vacations are fun, but when it’s time to go home, suddenly you feel like you need a vacation from that vacation.The moment you arrive in your home sweet home, you are gently reminded why you don’t leave it very often.

1. An empty fridge.

You get home at 1 a.m. and immediately the kids are hungry. Does spoiled milked count as a liquid or a solid?

2. The Mt. Everest of laundry.

If your washing machine could speak, it would say “FML” the moment you put four suitcases’ worth of laundry in it.

3. Paying the house sitter.

To water the plants, turn on the front porch light, and feed Mittens, you probably just paid the teenager enough to buy a new Porsche.

4. What mayhem happened while you were away.

Guess your sitter didn’t notice the basement flooded and Mittens had the Hershey squirts under your bed. Joy.

5. The joy of germs.

No matter how many baths in Purell you made your child take, how many Airborne tablets your put in their daily diet, or how you boiled their bed sheets in the hotel room, someone always comes home with a nasty bug. Always.

6. Reluctance to unpack.

Is it really necessary to unpack right away? It’s not like you’re going to be wearing those sandals tomorrow right away. This will of course change when you are butt naked in the shower and realized you need that one shampoo in the luggage three flights below you.

7. What you forgot.

Your book? No big deal.

Your charger? You’ll have to run to Best Buy tomorrow.

Susie’s precious teddy bear? Shit. Guess you are calling the FBI, the CIA and Missing Persons to track down Snuggles so your daughter can sleep tonight.

8. Jet Lag.

It’s 3 a.m., but according to little Johnny it’s 6 a.m., which means you need to get up, make him a bowl of Fruit Loops and put on Thomas the Tank Engine. Of course, once you have this all put together with a cup of coffee in you, he’ll decide it’s time to take a nap. SOB.

9. The absence of relatives.

As much as you love Aunt Ruth and Gam Gam, it’s nice to be able to come back to your norm. Not according to your child. He loved the constant gifts and undivided attention. For all he knows, aliens beamed your relatives up to the sky, where he will never see them again. “Aliens” being you, and it’s all your fault he can’t have chocolate for dinner. Now you must suffer.

10. Back to the same old shit.

It was fun being able to have Mickey Mouse serve you pancakes every morning, cleaning staff to make the beds, and a smiling greeter always at the desk saying “Mahalo.” Now you’re back to having cold, stale cereal, begging your kids to clean their rooms, and greeting your husband with “guess what YOUR offspring did today?” when he enters the house.

Maybe next time you should just send the family home and live at the resort for the rest of your life.