Parents of little ones, you can relax. Your kids’ memories will not be what you expect.
We were at Disneyland, Josiah was five years old, and we were chatting as he held my hand.
“Mommy, is it true that Disneyland is the happiest place on earth?” he asked me.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I think that there are a lot of happy places. Like Chaza Mwamba [our favorite beach house in Tanzania].”
He thought about this for a moment and then decided, “I think the plane is the happiest place.”
I’m not sure I had learned the Required Parent Poker Face at this point in my parenting.
“The plane?” I sputtered.
The plane, for me, was probably the Least Happiest Place on Earth. Being locked in a metal tube for sixteen hours, thirty thousand feet above the earth, unable to sleep, is not my idea of fun.
“I get to watch so many movies,” Josiah explained.
‘Tis true. Long-haul flights were the only time in my children’s lives when they got to watch as many movies as they wanted, pausing only to eat the endless snacks handed to them by smiling flight attendants. I suppose, for a five-year-old, this was the definition of a bliss even greater than Disneyland.
In the summer of 2017, my parents took us to the awe-inspiring Zion National Park in Utah, where we rode bikes through valleys guarded by massive red-rock cliffs. My children’s memories of that trip? Playing Wiffle Ball in the sprinklers with Gil and playing four square with their grandparents at our Airbnb. They remember nothing about Zion.
