When the family goal falls apart

My kids are both animal lovers. My younger one in particular goes through phases of being obsessed with specific animals. About a year ago, the object of their obsession was elephants, and they insisted on collecting all things elephant. After a few months, it became insects, which was not fun for me given my fear and strong dislike of insects. I thought I would be relieved when they moved on to their next obsession, but it turned out to be snakes. Unsurprisingly, someone like me who is afraid of insects is likely to be afraid of snakes too. Anyway, zoos are naturally one of my kids’ favorite places. After watching a documentary set in Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World, my kids both requested to go to Animal Kingdom this summer. However, visiting Florida in the summer does not sound like a fun idea to me, so after some negotiation, they decided that an acceptable alternative was to make it a goal to visit five zoos this summer instead.

At the start of the summer, I had a plan to make it happen. With two zoos relatively local to us that we already visit at least once each summer, we only needed to find three more zoos to meet our goal. I had a ten-day road trip planned at the end of summer that would have allowed us to easily visit three zoos that we had always wanted to visit as a family. However, as I started planning the road trip, other considerations came into play, and we decided to scrap the road trip and make a shorter weeklong trip to a different part of the country. We would still be visiting a zoo on our vacation, but it would only be one zoo and not five.

I shared the change in plans with my kids, and I told them that we were likely not going to visit five zoos this summer. Surprisingly, they took it in stride. My younger, ever-flexible child immediately said, “We can just try to visit five zoos this year instead.” My older child said, “Why don’t we set a different goal and plan to visit five ice cream shops on vacation instead?” (my kids are very treat-motivated). We decided to do both: extend the time range for the zoo goal and plan to visit five ice cream shops.

The visits to five ice cream shops on our vacation would have happened with or without the goal anyway, because I personally love ice cream on hot summer days. Whether we will be able to make it to five zoos by the end of the year is still an open question. Besides the one zoo we visited on our trip, we do not have any current travel plans that will make the two remaining zoo visits likely - though on a long weekend when we don’t have anything planned, we might find ourselves taking a quick road trip to one of the zoos within driving range of us. Since the goals are ours, we get to adjust them as we see fit. And if we don’t make it to five zoos by the end of the year, my younger one has already decided: “We can always do it next year.”