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Why You’ll Be Thankful For Insisting On Family Vacations

Even when traveling together isn’t easy.

Susan Poole
7 min readJul 27, 2021
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The first summer after my oldest was born, we took a last-minute trip to Cape Cod with my parents, packing the car with all the “necessities,” including a stroller, a portable crib, a bouncy seat and a “compact” highchair. You can imagine how crowded our 4-door sedan was and why we bought a large SUV the following year.

Little did we know at the time, but that impromptu excursion marked the first of many memorable family vacations. And after adding two more kids to the mix, vacation days definitely didn’t look like they used to before becoming parents, but we realize now how important they were to our kids’ development.

Here are some lessons we’ve learned from “time on the road” with our kids:

“Vacation” doesn’t have to mean anything fancy.

Let’s face it—some years are leaner than others. Depending on what’s going on in your life at any given time, there may or may not be extra money in the budget to take a family vacation. We’ve been lucky enough to take some pretty amazing trips, but we’ve also had to cut corners more than once to accommodate some unanticipated changes in our household income and…

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Susan Poole
Susan Poole

Written by Susan Poole

Mother, lawyer, nonprofit executive, breast cancer survivor, and women's fiction author. https://susanpooleauthor.com

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