Kids are spending the night at Grandma’s. Ha! I could stop this post right there and it would make total sense. But there is a bit more to the story.

I wanted to take Chris to Eastside Showroom and maybe go for coffee afterwards, but the universe knew better. Way better.

Um, so we completely put out of our heads that Harry Potter was opening this weekend thinking we weren’t going to be able to see it for a while. My mother reminded me it was opening when she mentioned the review in the paper. Great Scott! I checked for tickets when I got and there were tons available. Yay!

So I call hubby at work and tell him to just come home early! He did and we hit a 4:10pm show. No lines, our pick of seats, few people – it was great! We got to see it opening weekend – so damn cool!

Heading out it was time for food..comfort food. So Kerbey Lane it was. We had a great meal. Chatted a bit about life and the kids. We eat fast, so ya know, that is about it.

Then I suggested we head to Bookpeople for coffee and book browsing. Oh my! We had the most amazing time. I recognized the manager who worked there which was cool – I love Austin is still a small town. Then I remembered a local poet whose latest book I wanted to find and I did!

Then to the stationary/card section – they have the most amazing selection! I found these awesome joke “borrow my pens” that I had wanted. I’d seen them in the window of a store in Fredericksburg, but the store was closed. Thought I would search on-line so was thrilled to find them here! Then found this great “High Five” nifty notes. It has things like, You: *showered *held it together *made toast * look good *made me look good *used your brain *showed them *were great last night. I was laughing my head off. At this point I decided if something made me laugh out loud, I was buying it.

The best one was the collection of 100 postcards from the Onion. Oh my god! My favorite on the outside of the box was “Head Lice Going Around Senate” with a picture of a nurse checking John Kerry’s head. I can’t wait to send these to friends..maybe in my Christmas cards! Hmmmm…

Then we ran into one of our best friends from college and another one of his friends that we used to hang out with years ago. It was so awesome to catch up, chat and laugh. It was great to see them.

Finally, I made it up to the kids section where i made a list of books for the kids for Christmas. Tyler just turned 6 and so I had to get “Now we are six” from A.A. Milne. I received that book when I was six and had to continue to tradition. I also got another autumn book to add to our seasonal collection and will give to Quinn.

Oh and we found band-aids for stocking stuffers – pirate ones for Tyler and monkeys for Quinn. My favorites though were the ones that looked like bacon and another that were police “do not cross” tape.

It was just fun! I told Chris I had an awesome night. It was all unexpected and full of great surprises! Now I am off to read all 100 Onion postcards and have a few more chuckles before I hit the hay.

We started the day of our renewal with a photo shoot by our friend and photographer Meredith Winn. We have never had pictures taken of us. Though I had wanted to do something like this, I never understood why. That isn’t real anyway, I would say. But a week before our renewal this same friend had her own experience being on the other side of the lens and blogged it. She articulated what I was feeling and I new in an instant that I wanted us to be seen.

The shoot is a strange thing I must admit. Even with a good friend shooting us. I was very happy with the pictures we got back. Meredith has a way of seeing the soul of her subjects; she sees you.

My favorite shot of the whole bunch is below. The kids are not in this one – it is just Chris and I. It is my favorite because we both looked straight into the lens. That is the shot I wanted more than anything: us. We allowed the camera to look beyond our eyes and peer in.

We are together in this life. Right now life feels heavy. We are both open and vulnerable. All walls are down. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced in our 14 years of being together. Rarely do we feel safe enough to be emotionally naked in front of another person – even those with which we are incredibly close. No defenses and nothing hidden. Life is so odd that such beauty comes from hard times. I feel so incredibly blessed to have his arm to squeeze. Though we feel lost, we are lost together.

Love it will not betray you
Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be
There is a design, an alignment, a cry
Of my heart to see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be

And these pictures. Now I have them. And for a month they have been on a CD sitting on our desk waiting to be given to family and printed for our walls. But they are more than that. In times like this where everything is a question – when I feel so distanced from my kids, when we feel lost, when we don’t know who we are…..I look at these photos.

And there we are. We are found. Sure the kids were a bit nuts that day and sure Chris and I weren’t quite sure what to do, but I had someone there who knew how to find us. It didn’t matter what was happening on the surface. Meredith wouldn’t lose us. It is so beautiful to be seen….and also to be found.

Hi there.

We just returned from a really shitty vacation. It was shitty for a whole host of reasons. And not that things have to go well to make a vacation good – one of our best vacations included a cabin that got flooded, a tent that blew over at midnight and required us to pack up and take the kids to a hotel, and a car accident.

Maybe we were hoping to find something this time. Maybe we wanted to feel something that has been missing. But really, we are both lost inside ourselves. And our kids picking up on that seemed so very lost themselves. They were forces to be reckoned with on this trip.

The upsides of such experiences is that Chris and I talk. We are stopped at a park in the middle of the journey home and as the kids play, we try to figure it out. We talk calmly and honestly. We know this place sucks. I think deep down we are both blindsided by just how heavy life has become.

We are both depressed. We came to the end of our plan and never really made a new one. I think that we were on the get married, get house, get dog, have kids, have career. I quit to stay home after Quinn was born and we knew I would be home until they were school age.

Now I am homeschooling, but for how long and what is next. What does Chris want? What the hell do we want to do with our lives anyway? What are we saving for? We ran into a man who lives pretty cheaply traveling around to all the national parks – Chris eyes lit up!

Here we are – we created this family and we don’t know what to do with it. Having it requires a lot from us and we are serious-types. So much so that we put all of ourselves into the responsibility and we lose ourselves. We are always dealing with the hard stuff that we don’t even know how to have fun anymore. We are both trying to keep life under control….and we have young children. Needing to feel control + young children = impossible, total hell and utter chaos.

I told Chris today that if we hadn’t had kids, I wouldn’t feel so concerned about the future. I could just live my life and die. And to some degree I envy that. The truth is I am tired of all the responsibility. It is sometimes hard to detach. Chris can’t detach, so even if I try to bring the levity, he is steeped in work stress.

Ultimately we need to embrace the chaos that is life and not worry about the lack of answers. We need to take risks and get back to enjoying the surprises that life has to offer. It is just the journey.

But for right now, I just want to feel in control for a little while. And I don’t need cheering up. I just need some time to myself. I need to keep my energy and my ideas for me, for us. I need to put some creativity into our lives. We need to move beyond simply coping or getting by.

The holidays are a good time for us – we have lots of lovely family traditions that will help carry us through. I told Chris we need to have as much fun as we can the next couple of weeks and when the New Year rolls around, we need to set some serious intentions. We need to commit to living our lives more fully.

I miss us. I want to regret this turn in our life, but that is ridiculous. There is a lot of good and wisdom that have come from it. If anything, we are just growing up.

I am sure one day I will regret posting all this shit. But my kids will know me – warts and all. If my brain turns to mush or god forbid I am taken prematurely, they will see their mother and their childhood wholly. There were amazing days and some days completely sucked. And maybe if they ever find themselves in this position or feeling this way, they will know that it is normal. Memories get fonder as time goes by and so I like recording this stuff when it is raw and I am in the moment. Because this right here is just as real and the amazing times. It is all part of the roller coaster.

Everyone has a different way that they pull themselves out of the muck, and this is mine. I feel it and I ruminate… a lot. And I make sense of it for myself so I can then make a plan to dig myself out. I like plans. And I like thinking out loud.

And with that, I have a long to do list and the day is getting away from me. Enough ruminating for now.

“I’m better than this.”

I wrote that on a piece of paper earlier today. Because I am. Right now I am in denial, I am hiding, and I am scared. I am distracting myself from living my life. If you look from the outside, it looks like we are doing great and for the most part we are. But I know that I am not fully engaged in our days like I should be.

The biggest complaint I hear from parents of kids in school is how little time they get to spend with them or how they wish they could take them out more often to do things around town. I have all that and we have not been taking advantage of it. I know myself well-enough and I can tell you that I am just getting by as opposed to really living my days. There is so much more I could be doing with my kids.

And if I needed any reaffirmation of that, Tyler went on today about wanting more friends. He is a social creature just like me; we could see people every day and not get enough. And yet, he and I share the same dilemma right now. Our entire circle of friends went to school this year. And we are not going to get to see them as much as we want to. We are lonely. We have one wonderful family we do lots with, but ya know, they have days where they may want to do something on their own or with others.

Tyler and I have to make new friends. People who know me may be puzzled because I am so outgoing. Meeting people IS easy; making friends is a whole other ballgame. Of course, meeting people is a good way to get started down that road. I need to attend park days and other events. I just need to put more energy into it. There are some friends doing part-time school as well and I haven’t followed up with them. And really, I may not need to find life-long pals here, just other families that are searching for peers for their kids. It will probably prove to be a lot easier than I am making it out to be. Which is very typical for me – always making things more complicated than they have to be.

So I need to get going. I need to put my energy into this. I am always full of ideas, but I need to work on follow-through. And I really need to take better care of myself – set myself up for the best sleep possible, exercise, take that dance class. That may sound like the wrong place to start, but I have to give energy to get energy. If I am going through the daily motions and not living my life to its fullest, I will not have the spunk, spark and energy to guide my kids in living theirs to its fullest.

I can’t allow life to drain me. I can do better than the bare minimum. I have to work harder to keep my spark going. I AM better than this. I WILL be brave. I WILL jump in.