5 Steps For An Easy Transition Back Home After Vacation

With my husbands job and our busy schedule we are out of town a lot of weekends through out the year. We have retreats, weekend trips, camps, mission trips, and then you add in going out of town to visit friends and family or vacation. During the summer we feel like we are living out of a suitcase. We love our busy schedule and being able to do all the things we want to do and see people we want to see. But it comes with a price. Weekends are usually when we recover from the week and prepare for the week ahead. If we aren't there to do it, it makes the weeks really hard. So I have created some steps that I do before we leave for a simple weekend trip or for our summer camps and mission trips. I don't always get to finish all 5 steps but it is my goal before each trip and it makes the biggest difference when we get back home. Especially if we get home at 8:00 Sunday night and I have to go to work in the morning.

1. Laundry
I always make sure that we are caught up on laundry before we head out of town, whether it's a weekend away or a whole week. When you get back home you always have a bag of dirty laundry and I like to get started on this as soon as we get home. I want our dirty clothes from our trip to be the only laundry I need to worry about. This is so important to me because I always know that I will have work clothes clean for the next day. That last thing I want to worry about after being gone is making sure I have enough time to wash and dry some work pants.

2. Fresh Sheets
There is nothing like coming home and sleeping in your own bed with clean sheets. We are usually exhausted when we come home, so being able to have a good nights sleep before the work week begins is important. This does make for a lot of laundry before the trip, but I always try and get the clothes I want to pack washed two days before we leave so that I can pack ahead of time and leave some time to wash the rest of the clothes and our sheets.

3. Clean Kitchen
Having a clean kitchen is good for your soul. I truly believe that. If our kitchen is dirty, the rest of the house gets cluttered and it really affects me. Coming home to a messy kitchen will make you feel overwhelmed immediately. It should be refreshing to come back home and I think the kitchen is the make it or break it. My husband is always so good about doing the kitchen the night before we leave town. I am usually doing some last minute packing or cleaning and he takes the kitchen. Love him for that!

4. Clean floors
When we come home from a retreat or vacation we unload everything to our living room floor. Which means we may have tubs of bedding, camping supplies, shopping purchases, suitcases, etc.  If you already have cluttered floors when you come home it will just get exponentially worse. We always try and get rid of clutter and vacuum/sweep before we leave. It pushes us to clean it back up quickly, since it started clean.

5. Groceries 
This is my ultimate secret! I always go to the grocery store a few days before we leave and make sure I have something for dinner when we get back home. There is nothing worse than coming home hungry and not have anything for dinner. Instead of heading to the store, we usually end up ordering pizza or picking up fast food. It may just be me, but I always look forward to home cooked meals after vacation. We probably already ate out too much while away and I crave a good meal at home. I usually pick a meal that doesn't require a lot of work (like having to thaw meat). We will do pasta and salad or I will make a soup, something that can be done quickly and easily. When I go to the store, I also make sure to get some yogurt or something for breakfast the next morning. This also keeps me on track and less worry the next morning when I head to work.

Do you have any tips for coming back home from vacation? Anything you do to make it easier?