day on the lake

Our plan was to take lunch out on the lake. We paddled to the middle of the reservoir where the view was opulent and delighted in sandwiches overflowing with meat and banana peppers and followed them up with cinnamon rolls the size of our faces.

We then paddled West where, due to the water being so high yet from the spring runoff, we found an entirely new world on the reservoir which typically is so covered in overgrown vegetation that you can't get through. So we decided to follow the path and explore new territory.

What started as a lunch date on the lake ended in a long four mile paddle through thickets and beaver dams. We were yelled at by the geese around the bends. A great blue heron surprised us once, flying away in front of our kayaks, lacing our eyes and rendering us speechless with its magical magnificent blue coloring which became a soft paint brush smear against the gray sky. An enormous bald eagle soared above the crows, casually scanning the water for fish. None of these were captured on camera solely because sometimes, I think, they don't want to be captured. I think it is the universe telling us to enjoy the moments of beauty, where sometimes trying to capture those moments can take from the peace and significance of the instant.

Now it is Monday morning and I'm just wishing I was back out on the kayak! We played hard this weekend and didn't get much sleep, which I'm just sure is what contributes to this scratchy throat and balloon head feeling that I woke up with this morning. Hashtag worth it.

Happy Monday friends! Get out there and get you some!


xoxo

life is hard

It had only been a few days. My eyes were still swollen from all of the crying and my head was constantly thudding painfully. He said that I needed to get out of the house, so he called a babysitter for the boys. We drove through town and he pulled in the arby's drive thru where he asked if I had eaten anything yet that day. No was my reply, so he made me eat a beef and cheddar sandwich. It tasted wonderful and I almost finished the entire sandwich, a great feat for me in those first couple of days.

He took me to our long time favorite spot up the canyon. It was quiet and cold and we were blanketed by gray skies all around us. We hiked through the snow and stood by the river where I gulped the cold fresh air as though I wouldn't survive without it.

The thing about my favorite places, the mountains and the rivers that I keep going back to, is that they stay the same. Life around me changes and I try so hard to keep up with it. I exhaust myself to keep up with it. Sometimes in my quest to keep up with change, as in days such as these, I am left raw and broken, beaten and unsure of how to pick myself up again and move on with life while this kind of pain exists in my chest.

But then I come here.

I walk beneath the same trees and I swear that those tall, magnificent and friendly trees are trying to tell me something. The earth beneath my feet is solid, the river flows in its perfect balance beside the dirt, the rock walls tower above. They will not change. They will always be here.

I hiked below and stared at the flowing river, letting my mind go numb. I'm learning to live in this constant battle of trying to forget while trying not to forget all at the very same time. So I stared at that river for a long while and let it completely wash over any thoughts that tried to make way in my mind.

And then.

Suddenly, in a last-ditch effort to cheer me up, he impulsively stripped stark naked and ran through the snow and into the ice cold river for a short dip. And just like that, I laughed. He laughed. We both laughed and laughed together.

It was the first real laugh I had experienced in days which actually felt more like years.

He ran out of the river laughing and shaking from the cold and hurried to put his clothes back on. He said softly to the sky, that was for you James! And I thought of how James would have loved that, how he would have laughed too.



"The reality is you will grieve forever. You will not 'get over' the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same again. Nor should you be the same, nor should you want to."
-Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

on the day that we celebrate you

As you know by now, one of the things I gave you for your birthday was a book for our adventures. I made it, although what can be said about making it really, other than buying it and then writing some words and gluing some pictures inside.

The front of the book is a world map, and written in a black sharpie in my best handwriting it reads:  
our adventure book.

The first page is our bucket list together:

Mexico
Lake Powell
Hawaii
Yosemite
Alaska
New York
Banff
Italy
Grand Canyon
Seattle
Cape Town
Vancouver
Paris

The first two are crossed out because we've done them, following which there are decorated pages with some pictures of us at these destinations. The third one on the list is booked and will be crossed out next spring. I have this slight hope that we might be able to squeeze Yosemite in there this fall too. It makes my heart insanely happy, to think about experiencing every one of those beautiful places with you by my side.

And today, today is your birthday.

I think about you often. What an obvious statement, of course, I do live with you after all. But I think about you as a person often, not just you as the other part of me.

I think about you and your childhood. I think about you and your family, the memories you made growing up and the hard times you experienced right alongside the good times. I think about your childhood through stories told numerous times by your siblings and your parents. Stories told around the campfire on family camping trips, around the dinner table at family gatherings. These are stories I've heard many times that maybe I'll never tire of hearing because I can close my eyes and picture them happening right there in front of me. I can picture your towhead and your squinted green eyes and your childhood innocence.

I think about all of those experiences you had throughout the years that molded you and pushed you to be who you are today. All of the times you could have given up but instead you fought. All of the years that created amazing memories for you to hold onto, and all of the years that you waded through the thick mud of life and searched for the road.

I think about you and who you are in your career, day in and day out. I think about how lucky they are to have you working for them, the corporation who takes half of your hard earned paycheck to distribute to taxes and insurance premiums and retirement. I think about how diligent you work and how talented you are at what you do.

I think about life through your eyes and how you must see things. It's intriguing to me to think about this because we are different, you and I. We are often told how beautifully we compliment each other through our differences. We are this well put together blend of just the right ingredients, so that some of the sour counteracts the sweet, and vice versa. You have qualities that I envy ferociously, and I you. There are things about you that drive me crazy, and I you.

Today we celebrate you as a person, because you were born all those years ago. You are brave. You are thin-skinned. You are caring. You love watching documentaries and you eat too much sugar. You are intelligent and strong willed. You are thrifty and you hate having your picture taken. You are funny. You overthink most things. You are talented. You are fun loving. As is with most of us at this age, you have a heart that is slightly callused from experience and life, but beneath the thickness of its jaded skin all you are in there is a kid still. And you let your guard down enough that pretty regularly we get to see that kid at heart.

I didn't marry you for something unobtainable or for a list to check off or a standard to meet or a person to impress. I didn't marry you because I thought it would be easy. I didn't marry you because I was lonely. I didn't marry you because I wanted to have kids. I didn't marry you because I wanted to show off a ring on my finger. I didn't marry you because you passed a religious checklist. I didn't marry you because that's what I was supposed to do.

I married you purely because I met you and consequently I fell in love with you and who you are as a person. Falling in love with you had nothing to do with any outside factors. We saw each other at our very best and our very, very worst while dating, and even so, I had never loved anyone so fiercely as I did you. So uncontrollable, so all consuming, a love that didn't string itself up on practicalities. I could see into your soul and look at the incredible man that you were, against any odds. You constantly made my knees weak and my chest feel like a hundred butterflies were tickling me behind my ribcage. You made me feel silly and drunk and irrational and lovesick, and you became my very best friend above all else. That's why I married you.

And the crazy thing is, since I've been with you I've gotten better and better. Being with you makes me better. I am stronger and more daring in life, I feel prettier and happier. I feel that I improve every single year because you love me. I think that's a good omen of two people who are well for each other, don't you?

I celebrate you for you. For who you are. And you are the person I want to celebrate every birthday with for the rest of our lives. We will get through the thick of these harder years, while the kids are young and the diapers are expensive, just to be rewarded with a bonded family to adventure with forever. And when the boys grow up and leave the house, it will be us again, me and you. We will keep adding to our bucket list and gluing pictures to the pages in our adventure book, long into the future, year after year, birthday after birthday.

I love to celebrate you because I love you. How wonderful it is that you were born then, and how wonderful a person you came to be.

happy happy birthday to my one and only.

xoxo

p.s. pllleeeaasseeee don't shave your beard.

adventures with my mountain man

I think that quite possibly what most people who aren't living their dreams fail to understand about living the life you dream of living is the simple fact that: it is never the easy thing to do.

For example.

My dream is to live an athletic life. But as it so turns out, being athletic is not something that comes naturally to me. It's something I have to work really hard at. I try and try and try again before I really pick up on something new. I make goals that seem laughable, and then I push myself really freaking hard. I wake up at 5:30 in the morning not at all because it's easy for me, but rather because I know that's the only time I have to train. It's never easy getting out of bed that early. But when I PR on a run and find myself hitting mile split times that I never thought I'd be able to, I feel so freaking good. It makes me want to set new goals and try even harder. When I master that climb, the one where the rock was just out of my reach, so I continued to try and fall until finally I jumped just far enough and finally caught that rock. When I finally got up on the wakeboard after trying and failing and trying again, even though it scares me to death. When I am able to perfectly execute a yoga pose that I couldn't even touch last month, or hold a two minute plank while remembering the days that I couldn't hold a plank for thirty measly seconds, those moments make all of the hard work worth it.

My dream is to live an adventurous life. And adventures, well good grief, they are a lot of hard work. I have two kids under five years old, remember? When we take them with us on our adventures, it's work. I have to remember to pack everything but the kitchen sink, only sometimes even with the kitchen sink, you know what I mean? And then I have to keep them entertained. And I have to keep them safe. And I have to teach them slowly. I have to stop and change diapers and answer a million "but why" questions along the way. I have to dig deep, sometimes really dang deep, to find all of the patience that I can find as to make sure that I am allowing them to have a fun adventure at our sides.

And when we don't take them with us, while the actual adventures are much less stress that way, it's still never easy. I miss them. I think about them and I worry about them. Adventures in and of themselves, with or without kids, they aren't easy. They are a lot of packing. Sometimes they are a lot of money. They are a lot of preparation and planning and experience and practice and failing and trying and going again. It would always be easier to stay home and watch movies, we don't adventure because it's easy. We adventure for the memories and the beauty and the experiences we have when we get past how much hard work it is.

My dreams are not easy, but they are so worth it. They are always, always worth all of that hard work. And even though it's not the easy thing to do, I am really living my dreams and it feels so good.

This weekend the hubs and I took a short trip to go camping kidless in Idaho. It was just us and Rockie, which made for a quiet trip! It's very refreshing to have some quality time with the hubs. It's quite wonderful to carry on uninterrupted conversations. I almost forget what that's like sometimes!

Late Friday night, while we sat around the campfire, our sweet little Rockie had quite an unfortunate run in with a skunk, which resulted in her being sprayed SMACK in the face. SURPRISE! But I do believe she will stay far away from the next skunk she sees. Lessons learned, I suppose.

We also had a short run in with the cutest fox I ever did see, granted the only fox I have ever seen in person, but my goodness that animal was stunning! He came right up to our campsite and let us admire him for a minute before he disappeared quietly into the hillside. Have you ever seen a fox before? I mean, in person? They are so dang beautiful.

We set up camp next to what seemed to be a very nice couple, and while I do think they were very nice, I also think we ended up with some bum luck when the misses kicked the very, very drunk mister out of the camper at midnight, who, in his angry drunken stupor, talked to himself very loudly and threw beer cans around the campsite very obnoxiously and slammed his truck door closed a million times an hour for the remainder of the night. I kid you not, every time I thought he might be done and finally pass out, he kept right on going. I think he finally passed out sometime after 5:00 that morning, and so the hubs and I did not get more than a wink of sleep.

But, you know, memories and what not.

We finally dragged ourselves from our sleeping bags at 7:30 that morning to brew some much needed coffee in the percolator and cook some crispy bacon, while munching on sugary blueberry muffins, which all elevated our sleepy moods very quickly. Because there is not much I love more than bacon and coffee in the morning around the campfire.

After giving Rockie a good swim in the river to lessen some of that skunk smell, midmorning we took off to kayaking the Oneida narrows, something that's been on our to-do list since we got our kayaks. And let me tell you, that did not disappoint! I want to go back right now!

Don't be fooled, it was scary at times. It always is. In fact, as we were ready to put in my nerves had me like: WHAT ARE YOU DOING, TURN AROUND WHILE YOU STILL CAN!! And by the end of our run I had filled my quota on swear words for the day. (Because come on, nothing will keep you from panicking in the midst of kayaking through rapids like a really loud swear word, you know? It just makes me feel better I suppose.) At the rough spots I stayed behind Dan enough that I could watch and mimic his every move. He would point at which direction to go and which rocky rapids to avoid. There was one big rapid that was between some large, rather nasty rocks, and that one gave me a little scare. I never fail to be humbled after kayaking down the river while also, the adrenaline rush! The accomplishment! The high!! I'm pretty sure we both had crazy smiles pasted to our faces the entire time.

It truly was such a fun weekend. I will never get tired of these adventures with my sweet, bearded mountain man by my side! I'm so glad to have him.

Life is so good and the mountains are so beautiful. Get out there and get you some! It's worth it!

vacation hangover

Coming home from a weeklong vacation is rouuughhhh. In a slightly dramatic sense, coming home feels a tad like stepping in quicksand. I have spent the past few recovery days trying not to sink, but if you’re a quicksand expert you know very well that you can’t fight it. The harder you struggle, the more violently you move, the faster you will sink. So you just sit still as you descend at snail pace and all you have is the hope that a handsome fellah rides along on a tall horse with a very sturdy lasso to pull you from the depths of despair!

At this very moment, my handsome fellah with a sturdy lasso would be winning the lottery. Or just really anything that would allow me to quit my job and live in the Bahamas. You feel?

And for the record, I’m still experiencing the post living-on-a-boat vertigo. It’s this insanely obnoxious reminder that for one week, I lived on a boat! Except that now I’m just tripping over my own feet at any given moment because I’m struggling to remember how to walk on land.

I’m being slightly dramatic, but you know. Post vacation blues, amirite?!

While also. I was quite ready to see my sweet boys. Six days was much too long to be without them, and I’d be happy to never be away from them that long again! Being a mother is such a contradiction.

So but what was I saying? Oh yes, Lake Powell. The highlights of our trip included but are not limited to: 

Sleep in. Wake up. Eat breakfast. Take out the boat. Wakeboard. Surf. Swim. Explore. Cliff jump. Eat lunch. Take a nap. Go out on the boat again. Wakeboard. Surf. Swim. Explore. Cliff jump. Eat dinner. Play horseshoes. Sit around the campfire. Eat dutch oven peach cobbler. Play cards. Go to bed. REPEAT.

My dermatologist would be so proud of my sunblock slathering skills, and other than one tiny incident which resulted in some lovely-red sunburned kneecaps, I did rather well to come out without sun damage.

Dan and I had a quick run in with a bobcat on an early morning hike that we took while our amigos were all fast asleep in the houseboat. When that speedy little cat jumped out of the bushes in front of us I yelled "MOUNTAIN GOAT!" while Dan yelled "SPHINX!" And that's reaaalllyyyy hilarious, if you google "sphinx".

Playing horseshoes. I had never played horseshoes in my life so, that was something! It turns out that I largely underestimated the skills it takes to play horseshoes. Also, I did win the championship game, so I mean, I'm proud of that.

Dan landing not one, but TWO backflips on the wakeboard. Proud wife, right here.

And anyway, take a look for yourself, willya? May I present: lake powell in pictures!

 As you can see, it was beautiful.





Happy {almost} hump day amigos!