>Time Enough

>As I write this, I’m on the road somewhere between Destin, Florida and Atlanta, Georgia. We’ll stop in Atlanta to pick up the little ones at my parents’ house, then continue on to Nashville.

Aside from a 24-hour layover between arriving home from BlogHer and leaving again the next day for the beach, I’ve been away from my five and two-year-old for eleven days.

ELEVEN DAYS, PEOPLE.

It’s been hard.

Obviously, eleven days is the longest amount of time I’ve ever been away from my children. The first few days were fine, particularly because they were at home with their father, their sisters, and their favorite babysitter. But the days in Destin have been more difficult.

Oh, I’ve enjoyed myself and taken as many moments as I could to stop and think, “I couldn’t have spent two hours in the ocean/ gone to a midnight movie/ walked two miles on the beach if the kids were here!”

But every single time I saw a child playing in the sand, my heart fluttered. Every time I found a shell, I wanted to show it to my children. Each time I saw families looking for crabs at night with flashlights or building sand trenches for their children to play in, or heading out to a restaurant, I felt a pang of longing, one that only got worse as the days passed.

For their part, the kids seem to have hardly noticed that we’re gone. They’ve been living it up with their grandparents, going on trips to the zoo, the aquarium, the playground, and the pet store. I have no doubt there will be multiple complaints about how boring things are when we return home. And I’ll admit it made being away a lot easier when I heard their happy voices on the phone each morning.

But I think Hubs and I don’t want to let them out of our sight again for a long time to come.

It strikes me as funny right now that when I’m watching them day after day, I often long for a little more time to myself.

But now that I’ve got that time?

I’ve decided it’s not what I want at all.

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.