The Unexpected Moments
It’s another quiet Sunday morning. It’s super early, the sun has not come up yet. I’m wrapping up a week of vacation. A week of intentionally living unintentionally.
When we planned this week of vacation our idea was to take a road trip, but our plans derailed only days prior, well, because life happens. We were disappointed but I was determined to enjoy my week off from work. Summers are short and as the kids get older the time with them becomes less and less. They are also at an age where so many activities that interest mom and dad, do not hold their interest, they are lame.
This past week we slept in late, we had lazy mornings, we took our time. We sat outside, read books, and I got some writing in. We took afternoon trips to a museum, a whale watch, an escape room and more. In the car, the radio was turned up and we sang off key to unexpected family favorites. We played countless rounds of cards and board games. We ate endless amounts of fried foods and ice cream cones. We sat on our big family sofa together binge-watching television until we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore. For the entire week we were on a rinse and repeat of relaxation, if it took effort, we tried to avoid it.
As a good friend of ours said the other day, here’s where the record scratches. Let me be also real for a moment. While we were all home for 7 days, on a daily basis the boys used every single cup leaving them scattered throughout the house with various amounts of liquid in them. They made food, ate off plates and left a path of disaster behind them. They had a lack of personal hygiene which required constant reminding, you will smell teenagers before you see them. They started loads of laundry which were forgotten about multiple times. Imagine, gathering your dirty clothes, carrying the laundry basket to the machine, only to be horrified when opening the washing machine to the overpowering stench of wet clothes sitting in it for 24+ hours during an August heat wave. These moments created a myriad of reminders (which were not friendly or kind), eyerolls, some yelling and let’s not leave out the door slamming, that bedroom door is likely to come off the hinges, again, in the very near future.
It's true, they drive us mad, my husband and I routinely do sanity checks to keep things in balance as best we can, we try and remind each other that this is our season of life, raising 2 teenage boys. The week of vacation turned out ok, and you know what, reading what I just wrote, it turned out more than ok. True it wasn’t what we had planned it be, we had our family moments, good and bad, and created beautiful memories in between. Life happens and it’s in the unexpected moments where you can find true happiness.
So once again, I choose to focus on the happiness. I choose to focus on the joy this past week brought me. Have you had unexpected moment where you found happiness? I’d love to hear from you. Drop a note in the comments section below, direct message me using the Contact page or connect through the Facebook Group.
