That was easy (Das war einfach)…

March 10, 2009

So Julie and I sat down last night to go over our summer plans and schedule vacations and days off.  I think I’ve mentioned on this blog before that probably the biggest benefit of working for McCann is that we get boatloads of time off.  So we have some time to do some nice vacations, like our 3 week vacation at Christmas this last year.  Anyway, I jokingly (well only HALF-jokingly) asked Julie when she wanted to go to Germany this summer to visit Jodi and Christian, who moved there last year.  It got us talking about it.  It actually makes sense as a great time to go this year.  Next year is the big family Hawaii trip, and the year after that or maybe 2 years after that, we’ll be going to Italy for the Rome temple dedication.  When you’re leaving little kids behind, it just doesn’t seem right to leave them for more than about a week and I don’t want to be racing through Italy to get to Germany and splitting time between the 2, so I’d much rather take 2 trips.  Julie was skeptical so I got online just to see how much airfare was.  This was what I saw…

Wow!  Can you say serendipity?  What luck!  $474 round trip tickets to Germany from now through May!  That is an awesome price to Germany and a great time to visit.  I could see the doubt start to waver a bit in Julie’s eyes.  But her main concern was the kids.  They’ll feel bad because we just went on a cruise a few months ago – now we’re leaving them again.  And it’s during school, so someone would have to come stay at our house to watch them.

“Huh, what kids?” I asked.

OK, actually I said, we’ve got brothers and sisters, cousins and friends – we could find someone to watch them, couldn’t we?  Maybe Katie and Tagg?  No they’ll be busy with internships after school.  What about Meg?  I don’t think she has any plans for her summer break.  So I decided to call my amazing, beautiful, intelligent little sister Meg and see if she was still awake at 11:00pm to just gauge her reaction to something like this.  Here’s how our conversation went:

“Hi Meg, how’s it going?”

“Oh Derek, I would LOVE to watch your kids.  I totally want to.  I would even take a week off from work to do it.”

OK, well it wasn’t quite that easy, but almost.  There was actually one more sentence in there where I mentioned that we were contemplating maybe going to Germany but we would need someone who could come stay at the house to watch the kids since it was during school.  But that was it.  And Meg was practically BEGGING us to let her watch the kids for a week.

Julie started to get a little excited now.  One last check needed to be made though.  We called Jodi and Christian, waking Christian up at 6:30am there.  Turns out they are completely available and would LOVE to have a visit.  So that was it.

Now Julie got nervous because “it just seems too easy”.  I guess we got a visit from the easy button last night.  Which was EXACTLY why we had to do it.  So we bought the tickets!  We’re going over from May 25th to June 2nd.  I’m way excited.  Julie’s still way nervous.

Hopefully the actual trip goes off as easily as the decision and planning did.

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