Tl;dr; – My family has previously done a week long family vacation in the summer. Starting last year my brother had a child and as a result wife and I had a bad time. He has two children now and we want to back out. I still love my brother though and don’t want to hurt his feelings.
This story involves my parents (MF 60’s), my wife and I (MF 30’s) and my brother’s family (MF 30’s, F 2, M 1)
A little over two years ago, before my brother had kids, my parents resurrected the idea of whole family vacations. We hadn’t done it in a while because of starting careers, conflicting schedules, ect. And it went really well.
So well, that my parents decided to straight up buy a lake house both for their own enjoyment but also has a place for this kind of event.
My brother lives pretty far away, while I live very close to them, and my wife and I both put in a good amount of time and effort getting the house all set up and ready to go. We also have spent plenty of weekends there with my parents.
So last year it was time to have the week long family vacation, and unfortunately it just was not a good time.
I love my brother and his family very much, but my wife and I are just really not interested in children at all. On the flip side, my brother and his wife love their children more than life itself, and spend every waking moment they aren’t at work interacting with them.
Some of the things that bothered us about the vacation with them were:
Their child is not allowed to watch TV, but they want her to play in the main (TV) room. The TV was not allowed to be on while child was awake
Their bedroom shares a wall with the TV room, so when child is asleep we must be quiet and TV volume at a whisper level
They could be in a bedroom away from the TV to mitigate this, but that one doesn’t have an attached bathroom, so that’s what I get.
SIL is breast feeding/pumping which must be done quite often. Like every 2 hours apparently. But we don’t want to exclude her, so any boat excursions we do are very limited which really kills the lake vibe for me. It probably take 30 minutes for them to get ready, 30 minutes to drive to a cove and anchor, drink a beer and then start packing up to drive back to the dock
My brother and SIL don’t drink. When they are around neither do my parents. This is allegedly a vacation and I’d rather lean towards mimosas every morning and party on the pontoon.
With no TV and limited lake access, every spends 100% of their time just watching the kids play on the floor in the living room. I don’t enjoy this at all
Their child is scared and allergic to my very friendly miniature dog, who is smaller than the child. Doggo doesn’t understand why nobody wants him around when usually my parents love him.
So now it’s already been brought up about this year and I said I didn’t have a good time last year and I’m not coming this year. I’ll go with just my parents but I think it should just be the 4 of them without me for the week so they can cater specifically to just my brother. I could tell this was the wrong answer.
I don’t mean anyone any harm, but if I wanted kids I would have some. I want my vacation to be about me and what I want. I’m having trouble with communicating that in an inoffensive way.
What do you think I should do?