Max and I just returned home from a 4-night babymoon in Turks & Caicos and it was a dream.  Perfect weather, amazing hotel, uninterrupted sleep, uninterrupted reading, uninterrupted meals, uninterrupted po—well, you get the drift.  Traveling without the kids is something every parent should be required by law to do at least once a year.  It, no doubt, does wonders for the mind, body and marriage.  But there were a few things that did kind of suck about our kids not being there with us…and here are the top five:

5. I didn’t have to pack kid snacks for the flight.  Usually I pack a box of Teddy Grahams in my carry on, give my kids five bears each and then eat the rest of the box myself.  Since packing snacks only crosses my mind when I’m with the kids, I realized, while sitting on the tarmac at JFK, that I needed to come up with an in-flight food option.  Fumunda cheese and cracker pack for $10??? I’ll take two.

4. Since the kids weren’t with us, we Face Timed with them every day.  It was so great to see their sweet faces on the screen each time we called.  Until they started whining and fighting over who was going to hold the phone.  And who was going to give us a tour of our apartment.  And who wasn’t sharing.  And who Mom and Dad love more.  Just kidding – they know which one of them we love more.  Our calls consisted of three seconds of quality talk time followed by 15 minutes of them flipping the screen back and forth between a view of our black kitchen floor and our white kitchen ceiling.  Or they would weave through the apartment, holding the phone as if they had slinkies for arms, to show us that, indeed, you can still see New Jersey from our living room window.  Between the blood curdling screams (“It’s myyyyyyyyyyyy turn!!”) piercing the microphone and the Blair Witch-style camera work, we had to take turns running out of the room to hurl into the tropical shrubbery every time we checked in with them.

3. I learned nothing on this trip.  I had no one to challenge me with hard-hitting questions like: Why does a plane turn into a car when it lands on the ground?  How does the plane go up in the sky? Why is Turks & Caicos called that?  Why is the ocean blue?  How do you make a person?  Why don’t boats sink down to the bottom of the water?  Where does sand come from? Why is that 20-year-old girl making out with that 65-year-old man by the pool?  Oops, that last one was the question I asked Max over and over, but I’m pretty sure if our kids were there they would have been equally confused.

2.  I was able to watch The Twilight Saga: New Moon for 20 minutes on the flight home.  If the kids were with me, they would have saved me from this horrible mistake because: a) they wouldn’t have given me a moment of peace to watch, and b) If I had turned it on, the vampires and wolves would have caused them to sh-t their pants and I would have been scraping poop off of their clothes in the bathroom rather than sitting in my seat staring at my TV.  But since they weren’t there, I was free to flush 20 minutes of my precious time, 10% of my brain cells and all of my dignity down the toilet (instead of their poop).  And so, I sat there and watched Kristen Stewart, what’s-his-name and their digital baby live with a bunch of weird-looking people and fight the whoever-they-are and convince a bunch of other weird-looking people that their digital baby’s tantrums won’t kill everyone around them.  If that synopsis wasn’t enough to convince you never to watch this movie, please seek help.

1.  Drumroll…and the number one thing that sucks about not traveling with your kids is:  As Max so eloquently put it while taking in this ridiculously beautiful view:

“You know what sucks the most about traveling without kids?  There’s no one I can steal wet wipes from every day when I go to take a sh-t.”