Anniversaries, Alone Time, and Mostly

This weekend, the Mr. and I had a chance to get away without the kids. 

But you always get away without the kids, Natasha. 

Ummm, that may be, but I’m usually working, without the Mr. and surrounded by folks who don’t always get my brand of humor, or my desire to lay in bed late into the evening watching Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler get super emotional on their jobs, or with Aaron Hotchner and Spencer Reid trying NOT to show any emotion on theirs. I live the high life y’all. 

Anyway, we decided to take an impromptu long weekend to celebrate sealing the deal on nine years of marriage (if you’re new here, yes we have a sixteen year old which means that we were indeed doing the horizontal polka before we got married, thus ending up with our oldest) and still liking each other a whole lot. 

 

I won’t lie. Things got a bit sketchy when I had to pull up a Google map for him, but otherwise, we ate to our hearts content, I went antiquing while he grumbled, and we went on a walking food tour. 

The important aspect is that we got to sleep without interruption, eat without anyone taking off of our plates, and have some fun without little people knocking on the door to ask why there was so much laughter coming from our bedroom. I have those people in my house. They don’t care. They just want cereal. 

I’ll do a write up on the things that we did in Milwaukee while we were away for three nights, but I do want to talk about something that stuck out to me when I got back home. One of my friends wrote about being ‘mostly.’ Mostly put together. Mostly done with the dishes. Mostly finished with homeschooling her children for the day, and I realized that I’m mostly too, most of the time. I also realized that it’s not a bad thing. At all. It’s okay to have a mostly clean house, whether you have kids or not. It’s okay to mostly be. Really it is. 

What I’ve realized is, mostly is getting me to fully, and that’s progress. Although I FULLY enjoyed my time away from work and the house and my children (GASP) I was mostly excited to get back to writing words on this blog. I’ve felt uninspired for a bit. Mostly (see what I did there) when it came to writing from the heart. I mean, I can always write up recipes, or travel posts, or even things about Chicago, but pulling words from my heart that will resonate with ME is quite difficult. I’m often surrounded by these wordsmiths who have a way with stringing words together that are almost like a sweet symphony to a reader. I feel inept. I feel mute. I feel, not me. It’s often paralyzing, and destructive. 

Being able to feel a little bit of igniting is important for me. It’s there. Subtly flickering in the background, trying to gain momentum. I should thank Mr. Houseful. He’s the one that insists on us taking time out for us. He’ll even suggest that I take a weekend alone in a hotel to just rest, and gather my thoughts. He’s awesome like that. I wish that I could say that I offer him the same, but if I’m being honest, I know that I don’t because a small part of me feels that he gets rest since he’s without the kids the majority of the week. It’s a skewed version of the truth, and I’m mostly ashamed of it. 

I’m not sure when we will take our next vacation that isn’t inspired by a travel post that we want to do, but I know that it can’t be three years in the making like this one was. 

When was the last time you went away with just your significant other or alone? No working. No phone. No agenda. Let me know where you went, and how you liked it!