Hello...It's Been A While

Hey.

It's me.

I know, it's been like three weeks or something awful like that. The rest of you prolific ladies are writing witty posts with images and anecdotes and memories and here I sit, pretty much trying to force something to come out.

Sometimes I think I'm trying to lose all of the readers I possibly can.

Sometimes I think I am simply waiting for something to happen. And lots of things do happen, but I just don't feel like writing about them.

I think that's the problem when you're like me, and your personality is such that you require a little bit of quiet time each day. And not at 8:30pm, when you're so bloody exhausted from the day and you still need to fit in some exercising, and then shower, and then sit down to do the work you get paid to do and didn't accomplish during the day because you had a sick child home all week.

Mine is a good life. It is.

And I am lucky to be is possession of it.

But, like so many of us, it's quite a busy one, and when you need just a little bit of something to feel restored, and that something is in very short supply, you start entertaining those lengthy fantasies of running off to an island in Mexico.

Through my work I found this place called Isla Mujeres, and it's been this constant presence is my brain. Laid back and relaxed, it's the anti-Cancun. Just the place to get...well, restored. And I started doing all this research on it, looking at hotel reviews and B&B reviews that showed pictures of guests having margaritas at the low-key, open air bars, with free appetizers and the camaraderie that accompanies escapism. To quote Liz Lemon, "Me want to go to there."

Alas, it's not to be. At least, not yet.

I'm looking forward to summer, and I'm not. I don't look forward to being activity coordinator to two children home for 3 months solid, but I am looking forward to venturing out with them, and seeing what kind of fun we can have. I don't look forward to the bickering, but I am looking forward to picnics in the park with friends, hikes, day trips and water ice.

I still have to work in the summer, quite possible two jobs, and my children will be home all day, and I'll have to try to balance this again. It's elusive, the feeling that you're doing things right.

But it's the way things are.

Yesterday evening we spent about an hour outside. We pitched a ball for the kids to hit with a plastic bat. We watched Hannah run track and field around the tulip poplar. We watched unknown bugs fly haphazardly, like a dissipating tornado, in a distant patch of sunlight, looking like flecks of gold. We drank iced coffee, sat some and played some. It's the part of this time of year that I love, when things go smoothly and we are this unit and we're outside doing. When we shed off the passive nature of winter and work together toward a common goal.

So that's what I'm asking for. There will no free time, no margaritas in an open-air bar. (How to remedy that?) But I'm hoping to make some memories just the same.

And shit, I'm hoping to write a little bit more too.