A friend of mine decided to travel home for a week with her two toddler-aged children. Her husband couldn’t go along on the trip so she navigated solo through the airport and acquired a rental car. She thought she had planned for every scenario and felt confident she could make it on her journey until she hit a snafu at the security checkpoint. Her son had fallen asleep in the stroller and the security personnel required my friend to remove him from the stroller in order to pass through. After a major meltdown by her son, a nice stranger came to her rescue and helped her restore order to her plan. After listening to her plans to fly solo –literally – the stranger said, “I did that once.” Since then I’ve thought about what an interesting phrase “I did that once” is and what it really means.

“I did that once” is a polite way of omitting the truth. A more accurate statement would be, “I did that once … and it was an utter failure so I swore I’d never ever do something that ill conceived ever again.” Recently I sat across the dinner table from a man who told me how he took his family and another family in an RV across the country and I couldn’t resist making the comment, “I bet you only did that once!” We laughed and laughed.

This past weekend we took our first camping trip in years. We had a great time and struggled to remember why we hadn’t made this fun family time a bigger priority lately. Then we watched a young family set up camp across from us as they wrestled with their restless 24-month-old son and we remembered why we hadn’t spent much time in the great outdoors in recent years. We took our show on the road several years ago, our youngest daughter was only 14 months old. The day exhausted us so much that my husband and I fell asleep before the sun even set. As we watched this couple’s youngest son throw a tantrum during a diaper change in the tent we quietly mumbled under our breath to each other, “We did that once.”

Question: What have you done that you could look back in hindsight and say, “I did that once—and never again?”