a weekend away.

On Thursday after Carly's school, Chris took the kids to his parent's house. We were planning on going down there as his mom had several people who could participate in his dissertation study. Then he suggested, "Why don't I just take the kids, and you stay here?" Being a mom is hard. Being a mom with a busy husband, who will only getting busier this year, is hard. Being a mom during this particular Michigan winter is downright awful. Not to mention the long list of things that I could get done, pre pre-move projects. So that is what we did. I was so worried about his drive. My kids have a tendency to be little tyrants on road trips. But, naturally, they were angels for him.

[Playing the the snow in Indiana.]

So I have spent the long weekend by myself. On Thursday I spent a long afternoon at the gym, watched some tv, and spent 3 hours at Red Robin with wonderful friends. It was my little vacation. Friday I got to work. My main project was our wreck of a basement, and I spent 10 hours down there, like a creature in the black lagoon. I went through every storage bin, every box. I ended up taking 6 boxes of who-knows-what to Goodwill, and reducing our stored kids clothes from 5 bins to 2. It was literally a back breaking project, and I have a feeling I'll have to do something like it again when it is time to pack up, but it felt good. And the basement is so clean and open now. I keep going down there just to look. Saturday was spent purging closets, doing ridiculous amounts of laundry, and doing our taxes. Throughout the weekend I also watched a whole lot of Bomb Girls, ate a few too many bowls of ice cream, made the most divine fish tacos, and got emotionally invested in the Olympics. I have to admit, the days have gone by incredibly fast.

I learned a few things about not having kids. When you clean something, it stays clean. Like, I walked into the living room and no one had ripped all the books and toys off the shelves and spread them over every inch of the floor. When you need to go somewhere, you just go. You put on your coat and it takes 45 seconds instead of 45 minutes. You don't have to put on 6 pairs of boots (because even though I only have three kids you know those boots don't stay on the first go-around). You don't have to worry about who went potty when or who might need a snack or how long until meltdown hour. You just go and it takes 15 seconds to get to the car and 20 minutes inside the store. What a bizarrely glorious thing. I remembered the sound of silence. I'm talking complete silence. What has stuck me more than anything is just how very quiet life can be. Sometimes I reveled in it. But as someone who is accustomed to noise, it often gave me the heebie jeebies, and I kept music or the tv on. I often feel like life is noise and chaos. But it is them that is the noise and chaos.

[Going to space, naturally.]

I needed the break. I needed a little calm. I needed to therapeutically clean, and my home sure needed to be therapeutically cleaned. But the Lord chooses unexpected times to send us messages, and what I learned more clearly than anything else this weekend was just how much I love being Mom. Lately I have been feeling like I'm not enough. It seems as though everyone does something else, something other than being "just a mom". This world is filled with incredibly talented women, and it is so wonderful they can share their talents. But me? I'm just a mom. This weekend reminded me I'm not "just a mom", I am Mom. I have never once thought of my mother as "just a mom", because she was Mom, and she was the steadiness in my world growing up. And while I don't excel at much, most of the time I'm a pretty darn good mom. And I love spending my days with my messy, loud, beautiful, funny little tyrants.

I can't wait to have them home. I need the squeals and giggles and screams. I need to slip on books and step painfully on trucks and princesses. I need bouncing smiles in the morning and I need to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star every night before bed. Because while every life is different, these things make my life exactly what it is supposed to be.