Achieving R&R After Returning Home

We came back from our beach vacation on Friday night. After a harrowing day of travel that started at 6AM, multiple delays, we finally made it home before the clock struck midnight. By the time I got the kids to bed, it felt like the only R&R that remained of our Cancun rendezvous was the golden tan that I had acquired.  Thankfully, we had the weekend to recuperate from our vacation and I couldn't be more grateful for this time.  While we were readying for our return trip back on Friday morning, Kishore and I kept remarking how we should have stayed another day. However, come Saturday morning, I was happy we had a few days to settle back into our lives and meet the grind of work and school head on come Monday morning.

On Saturday morning, we slept in and the hour time difference to Cancun worked in our favor; the kids woke up at 9:30AM!  I made my way downstairs, made myself a cup of coffee and started reading the New York Times. We started getting the weekend paper again a month ago mostly because we wanted the kids to understand what "reading the news" meant, the cyclical nature of the news and that the world was larger than just the small microcosm that they see on a daily basis. We also wanted them to understand the physical manifestation of what we meant when we are reading the news on our smartphones before such a notion becomes obsolete. Also, as Kabir becomes a stronger reader, we wanted him to start exploring and taking sections of the newspaper that he found interesting. Funnily enough, Navya immediately claimed the Travel section mostly because it has the best pictures. She usually just asks us to read the captions under the pictures, but it's a good sign that we are talking about different parts of the world.

We had no plans for the day. No activities for the kids. No birthday parties. No social commitments. It was a day that we could do whatever we wanted. It felt like a continuation of our vacation, just at home and not in Cancun. So I read. I read the whole newspaper cover to cover. And boy did I enjoy it. I read about the TV-adaption of Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale. I read about how an author found love in Spain and the impact that such love had on the rest of his life. I read about the French elections. I read.

We had three meals together as a family, two of them more nutritious than the highly-caloric resort food we had been consuming all week. We laughed, talked about our vacation as if it were a distant memory and started planning our next one.  By the end of the day, the R&R that I had nursed during the week came back. I was no longer dreading going back to work on Monday, but in fact, looking forward to it. Mostly, to earn my next vacation of R&R.