Disconnect to Reconnect 

This is Mr. Houseful and I at Landry’s Restaurant in Branson, Missouri. We decided to combine a work trip and his 36th birthday trip into a road trip, and I can’t be happier that we did. Granted, I’ve been out of my house more than I’ve been in it this month, but this one week with him provided much needed time to just – be. Disconnecting from our very technological world, to reconnect if you will. We are BOTH tied to our phones, and computers all the time for work that it was just so magnificent to be able to be on the road from Chicago to Bentonville, Arkansas with no signals for a bit of time. We laughed. A lot. We talked. A lot. I slept. A lot. He drove. A lot. It is no secret that being on the road with him at the wheel provides me with a peace that I don’t get in my normal life. It takes quite a bit of a person to elicit that type of response from me. He’s 23 years into this, and still learning!

This month has been FULL of travel for me. Dragging my laptop and cell phone around and always being on it. Sharing photos on Instagram, Tweeting, and even blogging. I’ve been on Periscope, and even got more involved in Snapchat, and all that just gave me the clarity that I needed. I LOVE social media. Love it. It’s my job. However, being connected at all times was causing me a lot of stress. Especially these last years or so. Everything is hyperbole. Politics. Religion. Television shows. As much as I hate cats, we’re not even sharing cat pictures like we used to. My husband is always watching a dialer, and updating a dialer, and tweaking a dialer. He loves his job too, but it can get a bit stressful when codes don’t work properly. 

Hit the Road: 

We haven’t been on a non-blog related vacation in a while. We usually try to stay somewhere for ten days or more every year, but with building the house, we couldn’t make anything happen since 2012. We’ve done family vacations where we relax, but nothing just for us in almost four years. That’s too long. It’s just entirely too long not to be able to connect with the one you love. So we did just that. We worked around my schedule for work to make sure that we had a full four days of NON-WORK fun, and connection time. Now, we love LONG road trips, but we do have a place that is only a couple of hours away that we can escape to. It’s important to have someplace to go. Even if it’s just a hotel with no perks, but still clean and comfortable. Do it. One of the best places that we did go to was Holiday Inn in Wisconsin. Only an hour and a half away, and still felt like a long trip. 

This time, we traveled to Branson, and did NO cooking of our own. None. We have a vacation ownership with Worldmark, and we were able to stay in a one bedroom condo and live it up. It was weird to not have to cook once in four days, and to still have enough fun money to be able to enjoy the restaurants around town. 

Get Out of Your Electronic Devices:

Guys, I so needed this. I really did. I can’t speak for Mr. Houseful, but I needed time to just be his wife, and to have him as just my husband. Not daddy, not my driver for work, not a son or son-in-law. Just my husband and best friend. We were able to do a LOT of talking. No phones at the restaurant tables, and because of the highway that we were on, there was no coverage to speak of until we got to larger cities. I did sleep quite a bit on the way down (and halfway back on the way up) but when I was awake, we were doing a lot of laughing. Usually when I start looking sleepy, I get a gentle “don’t do it Tasha” from Shomari, and I giggle and the next thing I know, we’re wherever we were going. 

Laugh

One of the things that I love about my twenty plus (!!!) year with Mr. Houseful is that we laugh, a lot. We laugh more together now than we did when we were teenagers, because, hello teenagers! Little things set us off in a fit of giggles, and I am all for it. While we we were at Landry’s I sat and hummed and bopped while I was eating my pot of crab legs. I sure did. When I realized that he was looking intently at me enjoying my food, instead of feeling embarrassed, I giggled, because they were all mine, and I was indeed enjoying every bit of those crab legs. 

Get Intimate

Obviously, intimacy varies depending on which relationship you’re trying to foster. With children, intimacy may be curling up together on the couch to read a good book or watch a thirty minute cartoon of their choosing. Intimacy with your spouse is another thing. Do it. Without apologies, and without thinking too much about it. When there are no kids or any other distractions, it’s just so much better. Promise! 

Be Open for Anything

Mr. Houseful is not a spontaneous lad. He likes for things to be planned out so he knows where he is supposed to be and when. I’m cut from a different cloth. I love adventures, and I love discovering new things off the beaten path. We compromised on this trip. I wanted to respect his desire to get to places at a certain time, and he wanted to feed my desire to experience new stuff. We tried new restaurants, and he pulled over whenever I wanted to get a photo of something. We had no real plans for anything, and while that can really wreak havoc any other time, it worked SO WELL for us during this trip. Given that we have a family trip coming up to celebrate the 16th birthday of Nathaniel, I think I wanted to get most of my free living out, and I think that I did. 

I’ll talk about more of our Branson trip in a later post, but I wanted to give you a few tips to reconnect with those you love. Be it your spouse, boyfriend/girlfriend, parents, or children. Try it sometime. I’m fairly sure that you will come back a new person.