I failed

A few weeks (months?) ago I saw a contest on the Heart.fm website to win a trip to Disney; they were looking for two families to go to Disney World with them and act as reporters. You had to submit a short story about your last holiday and a photo of your family.  Here was my story:

The vacation of “yes”

We recently took one of those ultra-cheap-caravan-holidays with my son and newborn daughter and I can honestly say it was the best holiday ever.  We let my 3-year-old son dictate all of our activities for the trip and it was great.  If he wanted to swim all day, we ended up like raisins.  If he wanted to throw rocks in the sea then we tried to avoid hitting the dog who was trying to catch them.

As parents we spend so much time saying “no” to my son – No, you may not throw mud at the house.  No, you may not push your baby sister in your dump truck.  No, you may not shove breadsticks in your ears. – It was amazing to spend a week just saying “yes.”  He was empowered and happy, we were chilled out and happy and the dog only got hit by a rock once.  RESULT.

<no animals were harmed in the making of this holiday>

I promptly forgot about this until a few days ago.  I got a call and learned that from the thousands of entries we were one of the finalists.   I was then given a call back for a formal interview.  I did my best to answer their questions but, obviously, the second I hung up I thought of a million things I forgot to say.  They were going to call back between 1:00 and 1:30 to tell me if we were one of the two winners.  At 2:05 I got the call that we didn’t win, we’d come in 3rd.  I keep running through a million reasons in my head but I honestly do believe that part of it is because my kids are so young.  They wanted family reports; Rosie can’t tell you anything and while Luther can you won’t understand 2/3 of it.  Regardless, I still feel like I totally failed.

It also really hit me in ways I didn’t expect.  Things have felt pretty bleak lately and this was like a bright ray of sunshine … so I was really crushed when we got the call.  I keep replying it all in my head thinking, “If I’d just said this, or that..”

Oh well.  I think the kids were too young to really appreciate it anyway and it would have been a hell of a lot of work.  So now we start saving our pennies and hope we can afford to go there in about 4 years when the kids will be at ideal ages.