I would add to this - take a “Guilt and Make It Up Trip”.
What I mean is working parents who work long hours and leave the kids in others care for most of the year, try to “make it up” to them by taking this big expensive Disney vacation for a week or so every summer where they try and reconnect and makeup for all the ball games and events and such they miss with there kids all year.
It happens.
Perfect example of how society still places the expectations of the mothers. The husband didn’t take days off.
There are also parents who feel guilty about not being able to afford fancy vacations or to give their kids many opportunities, and so get snarky and find ways to characterize the nice things other people have as a negative experience or as a symptom of poor parenting.
It’s equally silly, but it happens.
Sounds like a stereotypically middle class vacation to me. In fact, it sounds exactly like the kind of vacation that my BIL and SIL would take with their four kids. He works and she is a SAHM. Funny that.
Never would’ve thought it’s a thing to judge working parents for taking fun family vacations. Intuitively, you’d think they’d be judge if they didn’t do that. It would be treated as just one more sign that they don’t care about their kids or want to spend time with them.
There’s one of the problems, right there: there used to be a 40-hour week. We need to get back to that.
Employers shouldn’t more than occasionally need more than 40 hours from their employees, workers shouldn’t need to work more than 40 hours to get by, and the government should overreach 
and make both of these things happen again.
Funny - grandma took care of my kids while my husband and I worked 35-40 hours per week, we made it to nearly all of the ball games and track meets and class trips grade school assemblies - and we still took at least one ( usually two ) week-long vacations every year.
Lots of people take weeklong vacations that you would consider expensive - and it’s not typically because they feel guilty about working. It’s usually because they enjoy it and they can afford it. Do you seriously believe that families with a SAHP who want and can afford an expensive vacation pass it up simply because they made it to all the ball games?
It’a all about priorities. I could have made much more money over my career, but purposefully took jobs where I could control, to a large extent, my hours (and relocation). It is more valuable to me to attend ballgames. plays, birthday parties, etc. than to put in more hours and pursue more money. Not saying all parents who have to work long hours have a clear cut choice, but it is always a balance of priorities.
It’s also true that a lot of what those parents want the money FOR is to provide their kids with opportunities: ballgames, plays, birthday parties, etc., all cost a lot of money, so finding the balance is calculus, not arithmetic: I suspect there are a lot of parents who could quit their job and stay home, but it wouldn’t just mean cutting out Disneyworld, it would mean “no, you can’t play sports/be a cheerleader/take dance lessons/fully participate in the world of your peers”, because we can’t afford it." So where is that pivot point? I don’t think money is everything, but it’s big deal to me that we can afford swim lessons and chess lessons and, yes, travel–not to Disney, but to museums and natural wonders.
My parents worked a ton. And there were times I resented that they didn’t have more time with us. But I can’t deny that it was good for me that 1) I had a car, and therefore the ability to work/have a life in high school 2) I had college paid for, even when it took an extra year 3) even now, their relative affluence often benefits me and my son and 4) (this is a biggee) I know they have enough money to weather their declining years–they will be able to afford to pay for help, for services, for things that let them live independently longer and die more comfortably. I won’t have to do the cleaning and the cooking and the household management for my declining parents, as I have seen so many do.
Time with kids isn’t absolutely better than the things money could have bought.
My math may be a little off, but it’s something like $800-900 a week for two kids.
Nowhere we looked at was actually as cheap as $250/wk/kid (other than a somewhat sketchy seeming in-home daycare), but there were some in the $300-350 range. There were also several that were quite a bit more. Our daughter was in a much cheaper center for her first year of daycare, but it was a somewhat mixed experience.
Well thats a good point, many asked why her husband didnt take time off but she did. I never knew her family dynamics or the answer to that one. Needless to say it was back when I was teaching and she was gone for a day or two almost every week.
But then I worked another job where it was the father who always seemed to be taking time off.
That was an excellent post. Kids might not see it when they are young but there are long term benefits for hard work.
How do we know he didn’t? Maybe she had lots of vacation accrued and this was what she needed to do to use it up?
Over the years, I’ve certainly seen men take time off to care for sick children, and even their wives if she was too sick to look after the kids, or took them to a babysitter. I worked at the big hospital with a woman who believed that a man doing this should be a firing offense, “because that’s not a man’s job.” 
Not only was she a mother of 3 (and now a grandmother of about 10), but she was raised by a single father at a time when that kind of thing was almost unheard-of, after her mother ran off when she and her sister were toddlers. Even so, she felt that was a woman’s job, even if that woman was a neighbor, aunt, grandmother, etc.
…oftentimes, a vacation they worked overtime or multiple jobs all year to pay for…
Not my business, I know.