Thoughts on vacationing with a toddler

• If you go on vacation with a toddler and attempt to put said toddler to sleep in a pack-and-play in the same hotel room with yourself and your husband, the child will refuse to fall asleep. For the entire vacation.
• Then, because you have no choice if you want to eat for the next week, when you take this sleep-deprived kid out to restaurants, she will whine and scream her way through every meal.
• It's also not a good idea to do all this at the same time as the toddler for some reason develops a pronounced fear of the dark which makes her start whimpering as soon as the sun goes down.
• The toddler's resulting entreaties to be rocked in your lap and serenaded with "You Are My Sunshine" to keep the dark-outside monsters away will shatter your heart.
• Then, if some asshole pulls out of a gas station onto the highway and comes within inches of sideswiping your car, when you start screaming, it will scare the bejeezus out of the toddler. You'll tell her mommy was just yelling at the Bad Guy to go away, and that everyone's OK now, and at first she'll look like she buys it.
• But then she'll spend the next two days asking for confirmation that the Bad Guy is "all gone." This anxiety will not help the anxiety about the dark.
• In spite of all this, if your toddler gets to spend plenty of time digging in the sand, examining horseshoe crabs, and running into the waves, she will have an awesome time.