I stood knee deep in the ocean at Castaway Cay, watching my husband and daughter swim out toward a sandbar. My son wanted to make it out there too, so I grabbed him a life jacket and we tried to follow.

We didn’t get more than a few feet. The second my foot hit the seaweed on the ocean floor, I was done. We turned back, my son a little disappointed, me completely unwilling to keep going.

Two years later, that’s still the story he tells. His mom, brought down by some seaweed.

I went through a health scare in December 2022, one I still don’t talk about much, and it changed the way I thought about time. In the months right after, we leaned on the trips I already knew by heart, our usual Disney park visits with the kids. But something had shifted, and I wanted more for my family than what we already knew. In May 2024, we tried Disney Cruise Line for the first time.

I didn’t book it with some grand plan in mind. I booked it because I needed to be somewhere with my husband, my kids, and my parents, away from real life, doing something we’d still be laughing about years later.

My son gets anxious about big things, so the water slides on Castaway Cay were never going to happen. The water cannons were a different story. He ran through those for an hour straight, completely in his element.

At dinner every night, our servers gave the kids puzzles to work through at the table. Watching my parents and my kids argue over the answer, three generations hunched over a napkin, is worth more to me than anything that was actually on the menu.

I plan trips for a living. I know the ship names, the sail dates, the deck plans, all of it. But that trip taught me something my job never had: you don’t know how much time you get with the people at your table. You just get the time you get.

So if you’ve been telling yourself you’ll plan that trip next year, or once things calm down, or when the timing is finally right, I’d push back on that a little. The timing is rarely perfect. Go make your own seaweed story instead.

If this is the year you’re ready to stop waiting, let me know. I’d love to help you plan it.