Vacation Miracles

Every summer for the past six years, my family and I have made a trip to Detroit, Michigan for our summer vacation. Now, I know some of you are wondering why we go to Detroit of all places. The answer is easy really; we go to Detroit because that is where my son’s eye surgeon is. Yes, we go all the way to Detroit every summer (we actually go three to four times a year) for a doctor’s appointment. We try a mix the trip up every year, spending time in St. Louis with my sister and her family and then a couple of days in Chicago, before heading over to Detroit. This year we spent a week in St. Louis and skipped Chicago all together, as we did the museum tour the year before.

As any of you who have made the trip from St. Louis to Chicago know, the drive can get pretty boring. My wife and I bring play a lot of “I Spy”, “20 Questions”, car bingo, and the license plate game, while trying to limit the number of DVDs the kids watch during the five hour car ride. This year, we were riding on the western edge of some pretty severe thunderstorms. On our left (we were heading south on our way back to St. Louis), the clouds were a dark, dark, blue that stretched from the horizon to just west of the highway. The clouds were breaking up on our right, the back edge of the storm clearly visible, as we drove through intermittent downpours. We were driving through a particularly heavy rain, when suddenly it happened: the sun broke through the clouds.

My wife immediately began scanning the sky to our left. After about a minutes search she began pointing to the rainbow. My eight-year-old son spotted it almost immediately and my two-year-old daughter could have cared less. My six-year-old, visually-impaired son was having difficulty though. He just couldn’t find the rainbow on the horizon. After several minutes of my wife pointing out the window and explaining where he needed to look, he finally said, “Hey, I can see it.”

There was clearly excitement in his voice as he began to shout, over and over, “I can see it! I can see it!” Although my wife and I have pointed out countless rainbows to him over the years, he had never been as excited as he was at that moment. I wondered why he was so excited about this particular rainbow for a minute, before he blurted out, “That is the first rainbow I have ever actually seen.” I glowed in his excitement as the rainbow faded from view, as a nasty cloud covered the sun again. My son then explained that he knew what a rainbow looked like because he has seen pictures of them and colored them before. I thought he had seen them in oil-slicks in parking lots and he always tried to see them when we pointed them out, but he never did. This was the first time, the very first time he had actually seen a rainbow.

It was one of those magical moments we experience as parents and I was so happy for him. I felt like I was in a commercial. Gas-$54.36, snacks-$16.84, the first rainbow your son has ever seen-PRICELESS.