Plugging Back In

Remember that one time I blogged and then dropped off the face of the Internet? Because really. I do. It all started on Wednesday morning. My phone rang. It was my mother-in-law. The first words out of her mouth were, “I have news.”

Something Austen inside me wanted to take on a British accent and start saying things like, “Such news! Most vital news indeed!” But I didn’t. I held my absurdities and just listened.

“Dusty’s coming home tomorrow.”
“What the HECK?!” I said, which I think sounded MUCH more smooth that anything Austenish. Agree?

Dusty, my brother-in-law, has been on a mission for the last two years. He was scheduled to come home in a couple of weeks but due to some missionary mixing ups, he was sent home a couple weeks early. The airport he was flying into was roughly 4 hours away, and my husband had just been called to work an emergency graveyard shift. He was devastated. Having served a mission himself some years ago (ten), he was really looking forward to meeting his brother at the airport. That’s when something Divine intervened, and my husband was able to get off work.
It must here be mentioned that by Wednesday, my husband had already worked his 40 hours for the week. He’s my little worker ant.

We woke up early Thursday morning and drove to the airport.
Blogging, dears, was far from my mind. Whilst pulling into the airport, I got on the phone with a nearby resort and made us some reservations. The entire family was spending the weekend at a resort, and I’d been calling the resort for a couple of days trying to eek in a suite, but they were entirely booked.
Again something Diving intervened, and we were given a King-sized suite.

And then we were given our brother back.

I hardly took any pictures this weekend. I really was unplugged. It cost $12 a day to use the internet at the resort, so I opted out. Instead, I went on the lazy river 8 times. Not consecutively.
But while it seems the rest of the state is on fire, the resort can almost make you forget.

Fire? What fire? Drought? What Drought?

At the end of the first day, my son completely crashed.

My daughter, on the other hand, did not. She stayed up until midnight. And then she woke up at 5. And then she woke me up.
“Mom, I just need a movie!”
“Mom, I just need a cookie!”
“Mom, here’s Santa’s cookies and a letter so may know what to give me.”

Finally, after falling back asleep about 5 times and being woken up six… I got up. I went into the room where the kids were sleeping to find my daughter fast asleep.
I cursed my luck and ate an Oatmeal Cream Pie. For breakfast. Yahoo for vacation!
I tried to sneak a picture of my husband in:

He caught me.
“You better not be takin’ a picture of me,” he said.

I told him I wasn’t. I told him that I already HAD. And then I told him I couldn’t help but take pictures of something so lovely.
Anyway, I HAD to take pictures of him whenever he was nearby. For the better part of the vacation weekend, he wasn’t nearby at all!
“Where’s Danny?” was the question of the weekend.
“It’s my single mom vacation,” I’d say.

Truth: Danny was busy visiting with his family.

And that was as it should have been.

(I’m pretty sure she shouldn’t have been putting her feet in that fountain…)

One night, after my sister-in-law had helped me out with the kids (we went on the lazy river twice), we thought we might stop off at the restaurant overlooking the pools and see if they were still open.
It was 9:30 PM, so my hopes weren’t high, but since I’d had such amazing luck all weekend… they were open!
We ordered up some s’more making goodness and indulged.

The kids were thrilled. Fire!

And MMmmmmmm…

My daughter was bothered that Daddy wasn’t there. She’s such a good girl. I love my husband just as much as the next girl, but when they plopped all of that s’more goodness in front of me the LAST thing on my mind was sharing!
“Daddy needs one!” My daughter said, “I will make one for him.”
And so… she did.

It was cute. And messy.

And he loved it. I should have thought of it, you know. But I was too busy cramming graham crackers together.

Okay now. Okay. Now I have some confessing to do.

Have you ever spent an entire day sleeping? or watching movies? or eating junk? You know how those days make you feel? Grimy, cruddy, loathsome…
Well, I learned over the weekend that you can effectively over indulge in vanity and end up feeling incredibly grimy. And foolish.
Vanity has always been a fault of mine that I’ve fought for years. I hate it, and keeping it in check has been a personal war.
As lucky as I was this weekend, I wasn’t lucky enough to remember to pack something to GO OVER my bathing suit on account of our packing up in such a rush.
I don’t have a fit body.
I don’t have a tan body.
I have rolls on my belly -ever present reminders of the babies I birthed (as if the children themselves weren’t enough).

Anyway, I had to swim in a bathing suit.

Do you know how disconcerting that can be?! Do you?!
I stood in front of a full-length mirror and sighed heavily before walking over to the water park. I felt a lot like Anne Hathaway in the beginning of “The Princess Diaries.”
“As always, this is as good as it’s gonna get.”

And then I mentally slapped myself for caring so much. Because, really. Does it matter? Is anyone looking? Does anyone care?! What’s the worst that could happen? Someone might look at me and think, “She really should cover-up more.”
Well, shoot. I think I can take that.
My inner voice swelled within me as I continued to pep talk myself out the door.
AM I GOING TO LET MY PHYSICAL IMPERFECTIONS KEEP ME FROM FULLY ENJOYING MY LIFE?! NO!!!  WILL SHALLOW THINKING BE THE RULER OF THE DAY?  NO!!!!

And then I spent the weekend facing my fears. Like the man afraid of heights at the edge of the Empire State Building, so I walked around a water park in my bathing suit.

(Lacy took that picture, and I can tell you that just before the shutter went off, I felt my husband suck in.  Hee, hee.)

And you know what? I lived. I’m sitting here, typing, and telling you all about it.

As we drove home yesterday, I told my husband about how I’d spent the weekend worrying too much about how I looked.
He misunderstood what I was saying and ended up saying, “Don’t look at other women and feel bad about what you don’t have. Just look at them and use them as motivation… like that’s your goal.”
Umm, shut up.

That’s NOT what I was saying. At all. Stop.

When I explained myself a little better, he understood a little better and I made sure to explain to him that I wasn’t worried about what OTHER women looked like. Just me.
Because I’m vain.

And as I discussed it with him and reminded myself that vain thinking is unhealthy thinking and that I’ll never fully enjoy my life until I get over my unhealthy thinking… I reached under my slightly burned leg (we ran out of sunscreen on the last day) and found an entire PATCH of long, black leg hair.

My entire speech flew out the car window.
“HONEY!!!” I said, “DID YOU SEE THIS!?!?!”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “I saw it yesterday. I was going to say something, but I didn’t want to embarrass you. Then I forgot.”

Well, yuck.
And can someone please explain to my why it is impossible to ever completely shave your legs? I always miss patches. And my legs are white and my hair is black.
And I burn and don’t tan.

Diddle-diddle dumpling.


(She wouldn’t smile. Minutes before, she had been teasing her brother. I got after her, and then had the AUDACITY to ask her to smile. “No,” she said. I snapped the picture just as she said, “I’m just in trouvle.”)

Today I’ll work harder to have better thoughts.  I’ll do my make-up and then forget about it.  I won’t spend the rest of the day wondering if my eye liner smudged or if my hair fell out of place.  I’ll abandon those adolescent thoughts for better, higher thoughts.
I’ll do whatever I can to keep myself from shaving my head and wearing a flour sack for clothes since that’s what I felt like doing after this weekend.
And most of all, I’ll keep this t-shirt in mind. My brother-in-law brought it back from his mission in Alabama for my husband:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a brand new nephew to meet.
Don’t worry, you’ll meet him too. Probably tomorrow. Same time, same place.