Running

We are dying to get back to work tomorrow. I'm not kidding. Matt - maybe only a little bit as a joke - set his stopwatch this afternoon to count down the minutes until he gets to start working at 9 AM tomorrow. At one point he looked up, grinned, and said, "Only 19 more hours, 23 minutes to go!"

Our trip to California was great in many ways: special time with family, little visits with good friends, and quick stops at favorite haunts in San Francisco. My parents were so generous to let us stay in their houses and borrow their car, allowing us to come and go as we pleased. Our friends and family were generous with their time, setting aside time for us to run in, visit for a little while, and then run back out.

However, the trip also served as a reminder that it is, simply put, not easy to travel across the country with young children. First, there's the jet lag. It was 5 days before Lyle slept past 5 AM, and only on the 10th night did he sleep quietly through the night, so the kids (and we) were chronically exhausted. Then there's the stomach virus that kept one of us home with each of them on various days - I'll spare you the details of that one. I had a bad chest cold most of the time and, honestly, I hardly even had time to notice it. Being out of his routine, overtired, and sick, Lyle clung to me like a barnacle the entire time. I slept in the room with him and he ate every meal seated on my lap. Most mornings, he cried for me to sit down so that he could be on my lap and then immediately started screaming for me to go make him some breakfast. Which I couldn't exactly do because, well, I was sitting on that chair with him on my lap. See my problem? And, folks, believe me, it was my problem. Not his.

Things got better after about day 5, when I pointed out to Matt that some of the difficulty lies in our expectations. For example, we should not refer to a trip like this as a "vacation" because it simply is not. It's a "trip" or a "visit". "Vacation" implies rest and relaxation, a get-away from your regular life. Taking the boys to the West Coast made our regular life seem like a piece of cake, and we found ourselves fantasizing about work more than once.

So we returned home Friday night only to spend this last weekend of our "break" filling out and compiling documents for our mortgage application and simultaneously completing a huge Family Tree project for Baxter's class that was supposed to be done over the past three weeks. We did it with him in two days, teaching him the most important lesson of all: procrastination. I have posted a picture of this family tree, which our quirky little family decided to create out of Lego figures. Baxter loved picking out little Lego props (sword, axe, flowers, coffee cup) to help describe various people. (If you click on the photo you can see the figures up close - you would think his family tree was made up of astronauts and cops!) Each figure has a number on his/her shirt that corresponds with a printed packet that lists the person's name, relationship to Baxter, and little tidbits of information. Many have pictures as well. It's very cute and we don't think it looks nearly as half-assed a project as it was. In a fit of self-confidence, Baxter had me email the Chicago Tribune, telling them about his unique take on this project. He figures he should be in the newspaper. I figure his parents deserve a medal.

Matt pointed out tonight that in the photo, it looks like Baxter's whole family tree is made up of marathon runners. And you know, that seems just about right, given the way the past few weeks have felt to me.